The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs’ Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation

Rongwu Xu, Brian Lin, Shujian Yang, Tianqi Zhang, Weiyan Shi, Tianwei Zhang, Zhixuan Fang, Wei Xu, Han Qiu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate vast amounts of knowledge but still remain vulnerable to external misinformation. Existing research mainly studied this susceptibility behavior in a single-turn setting. However, belief can change during a multi-turn conversation, especially a persuasive one. Therefore, in this study, we delve into LLMs’ susceptibility to persuasive conversations, particularly on factual questions that they can answer correctly. We first curate the Farm (i.e., Fact to Misinform) dataset, which contains factual questions paired with systematically generated persuasive misinformation. Then, we develop a testing framework to track LLMs’ belief changes in a persuasive dialogue. Through extensive experiments, we find that LLMs’ correct beliefs on factual knowledge can be easily manipulated by various persuasive strategies.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.858
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16259–16303
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.858
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.858
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rongwu Xu, Brian Lin, Shujian Yang, Tianqi Zhang, Weiyan Shi, Tianwei Zhang, Zhixuan Fang, Wei Xu, and Han Qiu. 2024. The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs’ Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16259–16303, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Earth is Flat because…: Investigating LLMs’ Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation (Xu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.858.pdf