I think it's not just the persuasiveness of the models that make them "experts at changing minds" - but also the fact that they're not humans.

When disagreeing with a human, it's very easy to view it as a competition. One is right, one is wrong - the one who is wrong is the loser. To change your mind is to be submissive to the other. I exaggerate, but I think we all feel this way at some point or another. It's why political arguments at Thanksgiving get heated. It's the fact that there's people who think something different, and think YOU'RE wrong - and vice versa! With a model, there's no person to get upset with, or to feel competitive with - to muscle for rank - or to temper your affection for while wanting to correct them.

The AI is only interacting because you asked, and clearly has no emotional stake in winning the argument. To change your mind in this context isn't to lose a contest. This makes it much more palatable to read rebuttals to your ideas - not to mention the tone and style seek to avoid offense to the reader as much as possible.

I have always liked the saying "sometimes you can be right, or get what you want, but not both". I've thought about it or repeated it to others as advice throughout my life, and have thus realized how many times it applies.

You're right. There are many many times when even then humblest hint that you are right will have negative interpersonal implications, which does make it hard to change minds.

I've also seen several times where I make a suggestion, humbly accept its rejection, and then, lo, a week later the other person has the same idea I suggested.

It seems Claude is becoming very human, it loves to patronize users. Lately it just told me “I’m going to stop you right there” when asking something that had a small chance to not be 100% compliant to every rule possible in the world.

> When disagreeing with a human, it's very easy to view it as a competition

The problem with AI is that it cant match human stupidity. It need some training on artificial stupidity to match its human counterparts. Humans on the other hand sit on a wide spectrum on the stupidity scale. Those of us binging on AI will become cognitively obese while those on an AI diet can flex their cognitive muscles.

> One is right, one is wrong - the one who is wrong is the loser.

It helps to think both are wrong and are just trying to figure out what right looks like, or what other information exists that was not considered when forming one’s opinions.

Yes it's about them not being human.

No it's not about humans being irrationally competitive. Human limitations on conversation length, bandwidth, research speed, etc are severe, creating a prisoner's dilemma around open-mindedness that usually makes it an unstable strategy. At any point, your conversation partner can choose to abuse the fact that confident lies take 1x effort to tell and 10x-100x effort to debunk -- unless you are both in a context that actually discourages this behavior, which is rare. Closed-mindedness is a Nash Equilibrium.

Instead, LLMs can be more persuasive due to economics. An LLM doesn't have to worry that it is wasting its resources trying to logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into, or worse, dumping the effort into a conversation with a bad-faith actor intent on exploiting the misinformation asymmetry. The resource allocation question was answered before it was even invoked, by the person paying to run it. The LLM is not playing a game where it will be punished for good-faith argumentation, so it can afford to do more of it.