“Persuasion for Social Good: How to Build and Break Chatbots”
Location: 503 Conference room, 177 Huntington Ave.
Abstract: Persuasion is important in numerous situations like healthy habit promotion, and emotional support. As AI gets more involved in our daily life, it becomes critical to study how they can persuade humans and how persuasive they are. In this talk, I will cover (1) how to build such persuasive AI systems that can persuade, negotiate, and cooperate with other humans in the game of Diplomacy. (2) I will also discuss how humans perceive such specialized AI systems. This study validates the necessity of California’s Autobot Law and proposes guidance to regulate such systems. (3) As these systems become more powerful, AI safety problems become more important. So I will describe how to persuade AI models to jailbreak them and study AI safety problems. Finally, I will conclude with my long-term vision to further study persuasion from a multi-angle approach that combines Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, and social sciences.
Bio: Weiyan Shi is an assistant professor at Northeastern University. Her research interests are persuasive dialogue systems, and AI safety. She is recognized as MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35, Rising Star in Machine Learning and Rising Star in EECS. She has received a Best Social Impact Paper, an Outstanding Paper, and a Best Paper Nomination for her work on persuasive dialogues at ACL 2019 and ACL 2024. She was also a core team member behind a Science publication on the first negotiation AI agent, Cicero, that achieved a human level in the game of Diplomacy. This work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, and other major media outlets.
Faculty Host: Alina Oprea