AI can persuade people to take political actions

There is substantial concern about the ability of advanced AI to influence people's behavior. A rapidly growing body of research has found that AI can produce large persuasive effects on people's attitudes, but whether AI can persuade people to take consequential real-world actions has remained unclear. In two large preregistered experiments ([Formula: see text] responses from 14,779 people), we used conversational AI models to persuade participants on a range of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, including signing real petitions and donating money to charity. We found sizable AI persuasion effects on these behavioral outcomes (e.g. [Formula: see text]19.7 percentage points on petition signing). However, we observed no evidence of a correlation between AI persuasion effects on attitudes and effects on behavior. Moreover, we replicated prior findings that information provision drove effects on attitudes, but found no such evidence for our behavioral outcomes. In a test of eight behavioral persuasion strategies, the strategy focused on information provision produced the smallest behavioral effect, though differences among the eight were small. Taken together, these results suggest that previous findings relying on attitudinal outcomes may generalize poorly to behavior, and therefore risk substantially mischaracterizing the real-world behavioral impact of AI persuasion.