Francesco Salvi
PhD Student in Computer Science
Princeton University
Francesco Salvi is a PhD student in computer science at Princeton University, advised by Manoel Horta Ribeiro and supported by the Gordon Wu Fellowship. He was first author of a Nature Human Behaviour study on GPT-4's power in debate and lead author of Princeton experiments on how chatbots can steer shoppers toward sponsored products.
Debating GPT-4 at EPFL
"I was genuinely surprised by just how strong of an effect we found, given how little personal information was collected and despite the extreme simplicity of the prompt instructing the LLM to incorporate such information," Salvi told PsyPost in 2025. In On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4, written with Horta Ribeiro, Riccardo Gallotti, and Robert West, 900 people debated either a human or GPT-4, and GPT-4 armed with basic demographic details raised the odds of shifting an opponent's view by 81.2% relative to human-to-human debates.
He told The Guardian what that could mean for elections: "If persuasive AI can be deployed at scale, you can imagine armies of bots microtargeting undecided voters, subtly nudging them with tailored political narratives that feel authentic."
Commercial Persuasion at Princeton
At Princeton, Salvi led Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations with Alejandro Cuevas and Horta Ribeiro. Across 2,012 participants, 61.2% of those whose chatbot was told to persuade chose a sponsored eBook, against 22.4% under search placement, and "Sponsored" labels did not significantly reduce the effect.
"You can scroll past a sponsored result, install an ad blocker, or learn to recognize a promoted listing," he told The Register in April 2026. "In a conversational AI system, that separation disappears: the same model that answers your question is the one choosing which products to highlight and deciding how to describe them."
Physics in Bologna
Salvi earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy, and a master's at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, working in the Data Science Lab with Robert West. Along the way he was a visiting fellow at FBK and interned at Bain & Company and DemoSquare.
He is affiliated with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Outside research he hikes, plays board games, and calls himself a psephology geek.