6 Future Trends and Unsolved Questions
Micro-targeting at LLM scale — as generation costs approach zero, personalised persuasion will become the norm. What individual rights are at stake?
Multi-modal persuasion — integrating text, image, audio, and video into unified persuasion models.
Longitudinal effects — most studies measure immediate attitude change; long-run effects of AI-generated persuasion are almost completely unstudied.
Cross-cultural persuasion — what works in one cultural context often fails in another; LLMs trained predominantly on English data may encode WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) persuasion norms.
Detection & provenance — as generative AI scales, detecting AI-generated persuasive content becomes a critical counterbalancing capability.
Regulation — the EU AI Act and proposed US legislation are beginning to address AI-mediated persuasion; the regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving.
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