Persuasion via Man and Machine

A Living Review

Author

Yaman Kumar Singla

Published

last-modified

Living Review · Draft

This is a living review — entries are continuously added and revised as the field evolves. The LaTeX source, bibliography, and compiled PDF are always available on GitHub. Readers are encouraged to open an issue to suggest missing work.

Also see the author’s PhD thesis — Behavior As A Modality: A Framework To Enable Automated Persuasion — for closely related work.

0.1 Abstract

This living review synthesises the science and engineering of persuasion across five millennia of scholarship and across the disciplinary boundaries that have kept the field fragmented — rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, political science, marketing, and artificial intelligence. We argue that persuasion is best understood as the optimisation of the effect of a message on a receiver, and that machine learning is now a fully-fledged participant in that optimisation — as an instrument, as an object of study, and as a threat.

Because this is a living review, entries are added and revised continuously. Readers are encouraged to open an issue on GitHub to suggest missing work.

0.2 How to Cite

@misc{singla2025persuasion,
  author    = {Singla, Yaman Kumar},
  title     = {Persuasion via Man and Machine: A Living Review},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://yamanksingla.github.io},
  note      = {Living review, continuously updated}
}