ALEJANDRO CUEVAS
I write amusing things every Friday at ->
With Francesco Salvi and Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(Under Submission)
We conduct two preregistered experiments (n=2,012) in which participants selected a book to receive from a large eBook catalog using either a traditional search engine or a conversational LLM agent powered by one of five frontier models. In some conditions, an LLM attempted to persuade participants to buy a certain book. LLM-driven persuasion nearly triples the rate at which users select the sponsored product.
The Impact of Age Verification Laws on the Consumption of Pornographic Content in the US
With Mohamed Moustafa Dawoud, Zhibin Shen, Ram Sundara Raman, Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(In Progress)
We leverage individual-level panel data derived from mobile browsing activity to study the impact of age verification laws on adult content consumption (from compliant and non-compliant sites) in the US.
With Madeleine Daepp, Robert Osazuwa Ness, Vickie Wang, Bharat Nayak, Dibyendu Mishra, Ti-Chung Cheng, Shaily Desai, and Joyojeet Pal
(Under Submission)
We characterize the use of Gen AI to manipulate public opinion through fieldwork in two countries characterized by their abundance of computational propaganda.
Policy Had Limited Impact on the Price and Supply of Channels
With Pranav Gadde and Manoel Horta Ribeiro
(Under Submission)
We investigate the causal impact of YouTube’s July 15th inauthentic content policy update on the supply, demand, and pricing of YouTube channels in two secondary markets: Fameswap and Accs-Market.