@inproceedings{modzelewski-etal-2026-ai,
    title = "Can {AI}-Generated Persuasion Be Detected? Persuaficial Benchmark and {AI} vs. Human Linguistic Differences",
    author = "Modzelewski, Arkadiusz  and
      Golik, Pawe{\{}{\textbackslash}l{\}}  and
      Ko{\{}{\textbackslash}l{\}}os, Anna  and
      Martino, Giovanni Da San",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1433/",
    pages = "31047--31072",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate highly persuasive text, raising concerns about their misuse for propaganda, manipulation, and other harmful purposes. This leads us to our central question: Is LLM-generated persuasion more difficult to automatically detect than human-written persuasion? To address this, we categorize controllable generation approaches for producing persuasive content with LLMs and introduce Persuaficial, a high-quality multilingual benchmark covering six languages: English, German, Polish, Italian, French and Russian. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations comparing human-authored and LLM-generated persuasive texts. We find that although overtly persuasive LLM-generated texts can be easier to detect than human-written ones, subtle LLM-generated persuasion consistently degrades automatic detection performance. Beyond detection performance, we provide the first comprehensive linguistic analysis contrasting human and LLM-generated persuasive texts, offering insights that may guide the development of more interpretable and robust detection tools."
}