Computers are officially better at writing 'sob stories' to get you to donate money than the actual people working at the charities.
April 6, 2026
Original Paper
Prosocial Persuasion at Scale? Large Language Models Outperform Humans in Donation Appeals Across Levels of Personalization
arXiv · 2604.03202
The Takeaway
In a series of experiments, AI-written donation appeals consistently outperformed those written by humans in terms of both money raised and emotional resonance. This suggests that the art of persuasion, long thought to require a 'human touch' of empathy, is becoming something machines can do better than us.
From the abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly regarded as having the potential to generate persuasive content at scale. While previous studies have focused on the risks associated with LLM-generated misinformation, the role of LLMs in enabling prosocial persuasion is still underexplored. We investigate whether donation appeals authored by LLMs are as effective as those written by humans across degrees of personalization. Two preregistered online experiments (Study 1: N = 658; Study 2: N = 642) m