arXiv:2607.00873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rhetorical strategies and their influence on audiences are often studied through social media posts and comments. However, this focus overlooks the universal audience, which is the majority of readers who remain silent and do not explicitly express how a message affects them. This study investigates how two classical modes of persuasion, ethos and pathos, resonate in the silent audience's interpretations of meaning. Using a dataset of social media sentences paired with human-written interpretations, we label both sources for ethos and pathos and
This study emerges as AI models become increasingly sophisticated in generating and interpreting human-like communication, making the nuances of persuasion more pertinent to AI development and application.
Understanding how rhetorical appeals influence 'silent audiences' provides critical insight for designing more effective and ethically aligned AI systems that interact with human users.
The focus expands from explicit user feedback to the implicit resonance of persuasive techniques, offering a deeper layer of comprehension for AI training and evaluation.
- · AI ethicists
- · Social media platforms
- · AI researchers
- · Platforms without nuanced content analysis
- · Simple sentiment analysis tools
Improved AI models capable of identifying and potentially generating more persuasive content, considering diverse audience interpretations.
Increased scrutiny on the ethical implications of AI-generated persuasive content and its potential manipulation of unspoken audience responses.
Development of regulatory frameworks or AI guardrails specifically addressing and mitigating the impact of AI on unconscious or implicit audience persuasion.
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Read at arXiv cs.CL