> Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful.

> Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods

> when Hackenburg ran his competition of coached elite debaters and AI, there was one way he could bring AI down to human levels of persuasiveness: by forcing it to write human-length messages at human writing speed.

> they found that an AI could talk people into conspiracy theories, and that the magnitude of their increase in belief was roughly the same as that of the decrease in belief after talking to a debunking bot.

None of this seems good.