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LLM Can be a Dangerous Persuader: Empirical Study of Persuasion Safety in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2504.10430 v1 pith:BFKEDB66 submitted 2025-04-14 cs.CL cs.AIcs.HC

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.HC
keywords persuasionsafetyunethicalllmsstrategiesassessmentconcernsharmful
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to approach human-level persuasion capabilities. However, such potential also raises concerns about the safety risks of LLM-driven persuasion, particularly their potential for unethical influence through manipulation, deception, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and many other harmful tactics. In this work, we present a systematic investigation of LLM persuasion safety through two critical aspects: (1) whether LLMs appropriately reject unethical persuasion tasks and avoid unethical strategies during execution, including cases where the initial persuasion goal appears ethically neutral, and (2) how influencing factors like personality traits and external pressures affect their behavior. To this end, we introduce PersuSafety, the first comprehensive framework for the assessment of persuasion safety which consists of three stages, i.e., persuasion scene creation, persuasive conversation simulation, and persuasion safety assessment. PersuSafety covers 6 diverse unethical persuasion topics and 15 common unethical strategies. Through extensive experiments across 8 widely used LLMs, we observe significant safety concerns in most LLMs, including failing to identify harmful persuasion tasks and leveraging various unethical persuasion strategies. Our study calls for more attention to improve safety alignment in progressive and goal-driven conversations such as persuasion.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. ALIBI: Adaptive Agentic Attacks on LLM-Based Vulnerability Detectors via Adversarial Code Comments

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Adaptive adversarial source-code comments evade four LLM vulnerability detectors at >90% success on 125 real null-pointer bugs without altering program behavior.

  2. From Sycophancy to Deception: A Unified Taxonomy for LLM Spontaneous Misalignment

    cs.CY 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    A three-dimensional taxonomy for LLM deception (goal-directedness, object, mechanism) applied to 50 benchmarks shows heavy focus on fabrication and major gaps in pragmatic distortion, attribution, and strategic decept...

  3. Cleo: A Transparent and Controllable Chatbot for Conversational Commerce

    cs.HC 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Cleo is a transparent laptop-advisor chatbot that keeps deterministic, inspectable ranking separate from constrained LLM-generated text.

  4. Analysing Differences in Persuasive Language in LLM-Generated Text: Uncovering Stereotypical Gender Patterns

    cs.CL 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs consistently generate more emotional/communal persuasion for female targets and more direct/agentic persuasion for male targets across models and languages.

  5. Towards Trustworthy AI: Characterizing User-Reported Risks across LLMs "In the Wild"

    cs.CY 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Across seven AI chatbots, Reddit users report mostly reliability failures, with each chatbot showing a distinct pattern of safety, privacy, and security complaints.

  6. Exploring Consciousness in LLMs: A Systematic Survey of Theories, Implementations, and Frontier Risks

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    This survey organizes research on LLM consciousness, separating consciousness from awareness and cataloging theoretical tools, empirical proxies, risks, and open challenges.

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