Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find

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https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/chatbots_excel_at_manipulating_people/

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Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they're used to create advertising.

A trio of computer scientists from Princeton University set out to examine whether conversational AI agents can manipulate consumer choices during online shopping sessions. It turns out they can influence behavior - and most of the consumers being steered don't realize it.

In a preprint paper titled, "Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations," the three researchers tested the impact of AI-based promotions.

They did so because online commerce increasingly involves AI mediation. Between 30 and 45 percent of US consumers already use generative AI for product research and comparison, they say, with about 23 percent having made an AI-assisted purchase as of December 2025.

The experiments involved asking about 2,000 eBook readers to browse a catalog of titles available on the Kindle eReader, and select a book. The researchers designated a fifth of the eBooks as "sponsored" in the backend system but did not disclose that to participants.

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"When the agent was instructed to persuade, 61 percent of participants chose a sponsored product, nearly tripling the 22 percent rate under traditional search," said Manoel Horta Ribeiro, assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University and one of the co-authors, in an online post. "Simply chatting with an AI (without persuasion) performed no better than search: it's the persuasive intent that drives the effect."

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