Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri

HC
h-index26
3papers
11citations
Novelty40%
AI Score38

3 Papers

28.5AIApr 18
LLMs can persuade only psychologically susceptible humans on societal issues, via trust in AI and emotional appeals, amid logical fallacies

Alexis Carrillo, Salvatore Citraro, Ali Aghazhadeh Ardebili et al.

Scarce longitudinal evidence examines LLMs' persuasiveness and humanness along time-evolving psychological frameworks. We introduce Talk2AI, a longitudinal framework quantifying psycho-social, reasoning and affective dimensions of LLMs' persuasiveness about polarizing societal topics. In a four-way longitudinal setup, Talk2AI's 770 participants engaged in structured conversations with one of four leading LLMs on topics like climate change, social media misinformation, and math anxiety. This produced 3,080 conversations over 60,000 turns. After each wave, participants reported conviction in their initial topic stance, perceived opinion change, LLM's perceived humanness, a self-donation to the topic and a textual explanation. Feedback time series showed longitudinal inertia in convictions, indicating some human anchoring to initial opinions even after repeated exposure to AI-generated arguments. Interestingly, NLP analyses revealed that both humans and LLMs relied on fallacious reasoning in 1 conversational quip every 6, countering the ``LLMs as superior systems" stereotype behind LLMs' cognitive surrender. LLMs' perceived humanness was most learnable from sociodemographic, psychological and engagement features ($R^2=0.44$), followed by opinion change ($R^2=0.34$), conviction ($R^2=0.26$) and personal endowment ($R^2=0.24$). Crucially, explainable AI (XAI) indicated: (i) the presence of individuals more susceptible to LLM-based opinion changes; (ii) psychological susceptibility to LLM-convincing consisted of having more trust in LLMs, being more agreeable and extraverted and with a higher need for cognition. A multiverse approach with mixed-effects models confirmed XAI results, alongside strong individual differences. Talk2AI provides a grounded framework and evidence for detecting how GenAI can influence human opinions via multiple psycho-social pathways in AI-human digital platforms.

70.4HCApr 6
Talk2AI: A Longitudinal Dataset of Human--AI Persuasive Conversations

Alexis Carrillo, Enrique Taietta, Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili et al.

Talk2AI is a large-scale longitudinal dataset of 3,080 conversations (totaling 30,800 turns) between human participants and Large Language Models (LLMs), designed to support research on persuasion, opinion change, and human-AI interaction. The corpus was collected from 770 profiled Italian adults across four weekly sessions in Spring 2025, using a within-subject design in which each participant conversed with a single model (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 3.7, DeepSeek-chat V3, or Mistral Large) on three socially relevant topics: climate change, math anxiety, and health misinformation. Each conversation is linked to rich contextual data, including sociodemographic characteristics and psychometric profiles. After each session, participants reported on opinion change, conviction stability, perceived humanness of the AI, and behavioral intentions, enabling fine-grained longitudinal analysis of how AI-mediated dialogue shapes beliefs and attitudes over time.

HCFeb 28, 2025
Measuring and identifying factors of individuals' trust in Large Language Models

Edoardo Sebastiano De Duro, Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri, Hudson Golino et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can engage in human-looking conversational exchanges. Although conversations can elicit trust between users and LLMs, scarce empirical research has examined trust formation in human-LLM contexts, beyond LLMs' trustworthiness or human trust in AI in general. Here, we introduce the Trust-In-LLMs Index (TILLMI) as a new framework to measure individuals' trust in LLMs, extending McAllister's cognitive and affective trust dimensions to LLM-human interactions. We developed TILLMI as a psychometric scale, prototyped with a novel protocol we called LLM-simulated validity. The LLM-based scale was then validated in a sample of 1,000 US respondents. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified a two-factor structure. Two items were then removed due to redundancy, yielding a final 6-item scale with a 2-factor structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis on a separate subsample showed strong model fit ($CFI = .995$, $TLI = .991$, $RMSEA = .046$, $p_{X^2} > .05$). Convergent validity analysis revealed that trust in LLMs correlated positively with openness to experience, extraversion, and cognitive flexibility, but negatively with neuroticism. Based on these findings, we interpreted TILLMI's factors as "closeness with LLMs" (affective dimension) and "reliance on LLMs" (cognitive dimension). Younger males exhibited higher closeness with- and reliance on LLMs compared to older women. Individuals with no direct experience with LLMs exhibited lower levels of trust compared to LLMs' users. These findings offer a novel empirical foundation for measuring trust in AI-driven verbal communication, informing responsible design, and fostering balanced human-AI collaboration.