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84 comments.

Thank you so much. This has truly helped me in my exams and throughout the beneficial journey of my school year.

Ellen Davis

How will I be able to check my work, when I print it out to work on them? Where are the answers?

I guess it depends on what you are working on. On what are you working?

Kareema Coles

Ummm the pdf version is not working…is the link still valid?

Which link?

This is an amazing website with fabulous ideas and printable ready to go lessons!!! Thank you so much! I wish I could meet you!!!

Thank you very much for this amazing resource and great ideas. They are extremely comprehensive and well designed. Thank you very much for your kind consideration and not adding a Price-tag to your valuable resources. Highly appreciated.

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Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your work with us. As teachers, we are always in need of fresh material. I teach college level creative writing classes, and your worksheets help my students. Sometimes I change the essay topics to fit their particular age group or interest, but having these examples laid out for us and made available for use in our classrooms is wonderful.

Lifesaver! Thank you for the great ideas and guidance. I am a new teacher, and finding this site has made a true turn around in my instruction. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Thank you for these great step by step resources

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Despite all the negative comments above, you should keep up for the ones (like me) who are absolutely grateful for these material.

Thanks for sharing! Best.

I give this website 3stares only for the info but in general 1star

I give your comment 0 stars because your position lacks support or evidence of any kind. Complete some of these worksheets and begin your argument again.

that’s stupid from where do u get the worksheets

I wrote them.

I did not see any activities that required the student to write an entire essay.

https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/writing/persuasive-essay-topics/

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Thank you for this information! They helped me in my exam so much!

These are fantastic resources! Thank you so much for sharing them. I only wish I had found them earlier in the school year!

There’s always next year…

Thank you so much for all you do for teachers. I love an use practically everything on your Website!

That’s awesome. Thanks for visiting my website.

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How to Write Perfect Persuasive Essays in 5 Simple Steps

WHAT IS A PERSUASIVE ESSAY?

A persuasive text presents a point of view around a topic or theme that is backed by evidence to support it.

The purpose of a persuasive text can be varied.  Maybe you intend to influence someone’s opinion on a specific topic, or you might aim to sell a product or service through an advertisement.

The challenge in writing a good persuasive text is to use a mix of emotive language and, in some cases, images that are supported by hard evidence or other people’s opinions.

In a persuasive essay or argument essay, the student strives to convince the reader of the merits of their opinion or stance on a particular issue. The student must utilise several persuasive techniques to form a coherent and logical argument to convince the reader of a point of view or to take a specific action.

PERSUADING PEOPLE REQUIRES A CONSISTENT APPROACH…

Persuasive texts are simple in structure.  You must clearly state your opinion around a specific topic and then repeatedly reinforce your opinions with external facts or evidence.  A robust concluding summary should leave little doubt in the reader’s mind.  ( Please view our planning tool below for a detailed explanation. )

TYPES OF PERSUASIVE TEXT

We cover the broad topic of writing a general persuasive essay in this guide, there are several sub-genres of persuasive texts students will encounter as they progress through school. We have complete guides on these text types, so be sure to click the links and read these in detail if required.

• Argumentative Essays – These are your structured “Dogs are better pets than Cats” opinion-type essays where your role is to upsell the positive elements of your opinions to your audience whilst also highlighting the negative aspects of any opposing views using a range of persuasive language and techniques.
• Advertising – Uses persuasive techniques to sell a good or service to potential customers with a call to action.
• Debating Speeches – A debate is a structured discussion between two teams on a specific topic that a moderator judges and scores. Your role is to state your case, sell your opinions to the audience, and counteract your opposition’s opinions.
• Opinion Articles, Newspaper Editorials. – Editorials often use more subtle persuasive techniques that blur the lines of factual news reporting and opinions that tell a story with bias. Sometimes they may even have a call to action at the end.
• Reviews – Reviews exist to inform others about almost any service or product, such as a film, restaurant, or product. Depending on your experiences, you may have firm opinions or not even care that much about recommending it to others. Either way, you will employ various persuasive techniques to communicate your recommendations to your audience.
• Please note a DISCUSSION essay is not a traditional persuasive text, as even though you are comparing and contrasting elements, the role of the author is to present an unbiased account of both sides so that the reader can make a decision that works best for them. Discussions are often confused as a form of persuasive writing.

A COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON PERSUASIVE WRITING SKILLS

Teach your students to produce writing that  PERSUADES  and  INFLUENCES  thinking with this  HUGE  writing guide bundle covering: ⭐ Persuasive Texts / Essays ⭐ Expository Essays⭐ Argumentative Essays⭐ Discussions.

A complete 140 PAGE unit of work on persuasive texts for teachers and students. No preparation is required.

THE STRUCTURE OF A PERSUASIVE ESSAY

1. Introduction

In the introduction, the student will naturally introduce the topic. Controversial issues make for great topics in this writing genre. It’s a cliche in polite society to discourage discussions involving politics, sex, or religion because they can often be very divisive. While these subjects may not be the best topics of conversation for the dinner table at Thanksgiving, they can be perfect when deciding on a topic for persuasive writing. Obviously, the student’s age and abilities should be considered, as well as cultural taboos, when selecting a topic for the essay. But the point holds, the more controversial, the better.

Let’s take a look at some of the critical elements of the introduction when writing a persuasive essay:

Title: Tell your audience what they are reading.

This will often be posed as a question; for example, if the essay is on the merits of a vegetarian lifestyle, it may be called something like: To Eat Meat or Not?

Hook : Provide your audience with a reason to continue reading.

As with any genre of writing, capturing the reader’s interest from the outset is crucial. There are several methods of doing this, known as hooks. Students may open their essays with anecdotes, jokes, quotations, or relevant statistics related to the topic under discussion.

Background: Provide some context to your audience.

In this introductory section, students will provide the reader with some background on the topic. This will place the issue in context and briefly weigh some opinions on the subject.

Thesis statement: Let the audience know your stance.

After surveying the topic in the first part of the introduction, it is now time for the student writer to express their opinion and briefly preview the points they will make later in the essay.

2. Body Paragraphs

The number of paragraphs forming this essay section will depend on the number of points the writer chooses to make to support their opinion. Usually three main points will be sufficient for beginning writers to coordinate. More advanced students can increase the number of paragraphs based on the complexity of their arguments, but the overall structure will largely remain intact.

Be sure to check out our complete guide to writing perfect paragraphs here .

The TEEL acronym is valuable for students to remember how to structure their paragraphs.  Read below for a deeper understanding.

Topic Sentence:

The topic sentence states the central point of the paragraph. This will be one of the reasons supporting the thesis statement made in the introduction.

These sentences will build on the topic sentence by illustrating the point further, often by making it more specific.

These sentences’ purpose is to support the paragraph’s central point by providing supporting evidence and examples. This evidence may be statistics, quotations, or anecdotal evidence.

The final part of the paragraph links back to the initial statement of the topic sentence while also forming a bridge to the next point to be made. This part of the paragraph provides some personal analysis and interpretation of how the student arrived at their conclusions and connects the essay as a cohesive whole.

3. Conclusion

The conclusion weaves together the main points of the persuasive essay. It does not usually introduce new arguments or evidence but instead reviews the arguments made already and restates them by summing them up uniquely. It is important at this stage to tie everything back to the initial thesis statement. This is the writer’s last opportunity to drive home their point, to achieve the essay’s goal, to begin with – persuade the reader of their point of view.

Ending an essay well can be challenging, but it is essential to end strongly, especially for persuasive essays. As with the hooks of the essay’s opening, there are many tried and tested methods of leaving the reader with a strong impression. Encourage students to experiment with different endings, for example, concluding the essay with a quotation that amplifies the thesis statement.

Another method is to have the student rework their ending in simple monosyllabic words, as simple language often has the effect of being more decisive in impact. The effect they are striving for in the final sentence is the closing of the circle.

Several persuasive writing techniques can be used in the conclusion and throughout the essay to amp up the persuasive power of the writing. Let’s take a look at a few.

ETHOS, PATHOS & LOGOS TUTORIAL VIDEO (2:20)

TIPS FOR WRITING A GREAT PERSUASIVE ESSAY

PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES

In this article, we have outlined a basic structure that will be helpful to students in approaching the organization of their persuasive writing. It will also be helpful for the students to be introduced to a few literary techniques that will help your students to present their ideas convincingly. Here are a few of the more common ones:

Repetition: There is a reason why advertisements and commercials are so repetitive – repetition works! Students can use this knowledge to their advantage in their persuasive writing. It is challenging to get the reader to fully agree with the writer’s opinion if they don’t fully understand it. Saying the same thing in various ways ensures the reader gets many bites at the ‘understanding’ cherry.

Repetition Example: “The use of plastic bags is not only bad for the environment, but it is also bad for our economy. Plastic bags are not biodegradable, meaning they will not decompose and will continue to take up space in landfills. Plastic bags are also not recyclable, meaning they will not be reused and will instead end up in landfills. Plastic bags are not only bad for the environment, but they are also bad for our economy as they are costly to dispose of and take up valuable space in landfills.”

In this example, the phrase “not only bad for the environment but also bad for our economy” is repeated multiple times to reinforce the idea that plastic bags are not just a problem for the environment but also the economy. The repetition of the phrase emphasizes the point and makes it more persuasive.

It is also important to note that repetition could be used differently, such as repeating a word or phrase to create rhythm or emphasis.

Storytelling: Humans tend to understand things better through stories. Think of how we teach kids important values through time-tested fables like Peter and the Wolf . Whether through personal anecdotes or references to third-person experiences, stories help climb down the ladder of abstraction and reach the reader on a human level.

Storytelling Example: “Imagine you are walking down the street, and you come across a stray dog clearly in need of food and water. The dog looks up at you with big, sad eyes, and you cannot help but feel a twinge of compassion. Now, imagine that same scenario, but instead of a stray dog, it’s a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. The person is clearly in need of food and shelter, and their eyes also look up at her with a sense of hopelessness.

The point of this story is to show that just as we feel compelled to help a stray animal in need, we should also feel compelled to help a homeless person. We should not turn a blind eye to the suffering of our fellow human beings, and we should take action to address homelessness in our community. It is important to remember that everyone deserves a roof over their head and a warm meal to eat. The story is designed to elicit an emotional response in the reader and make the argument more relatable and impactful.

By using storytelling, this passage creates an image in the reader’s mind and creates an emotional connection that can be more persuasive than just stating facts and figures.

Dissent: We live in a cynical age, so leaving out the opposing opinion will smack of avoidance to the reader. Encourage your students to turn to that opposing viewpoint and deal with those arguments in their essays .

Dissent Example: “Many people argue that students should not have to wear uniforms in school. They argue that uniforms stifle creativity and individuality and that students should be able to express themselves through their clothing choices. While these are valid concerns, I strongly disagree.

In fact, uniforms can actually promote individuality by levelling the playing field and removing the pressure to dress in a certain way. Furthermore, uniforms can promote a sense of community and belonging within a school. They can also provide a sense of discipline and structure, which can help to create a more focused and productive learning environment. Additionally, uniforms can save families money and eliminate the stress of deciding what to wear daily .

While some may argue that uniforms stifle creativity and individuality, the benefits of uniforms far outweigh the potential drawbacks. It is important to consider the impact of uniforms on the school as a whole, rather than focusing solely on individual expression.”

In this example, the writer presents the opposing viewpoint (uniforms stifle creativity and individuality) and then provides counterarguments to refute it. By doing so, the writer can strengthen their own argument and present a more convincing case for why uniforms should be worn in school.

A Call to Action: A staple of advertising, a call to action can also be used in persuasive writing. When employed, it usually forms part of the conclusion section of the essay and asks the reader to do something, such as recycle, donate to charity, sign a petition etc.

A quick look around reveals to us the power of persuasion, whether in product advertisements, newspaper editorials, or political electioneering; persuasion is an ever-present element in our daily lives. Logic and reason are essential in persuasion, but they are not the only techniques. The dark arts of persuasion can prey on emotion, greed, and bias. Learning to write persuasively can help our students recognize well-made arguments and help to inoculate them against the more sinister manifestations of persuasion.

Call to Action Example: “Climate change is a pressing issue that affects us all, and it’s important that we take action now to reduce our carbon footprint and protect the planet for future generations. As a society, we have the power to make a difference and it starts with small changes that we can make in our own lives.

I urge you to take the following steps to reduce your carbon footprint:

• Reduce your use of single-use plastics
• Use public transportation, carpool, bike or walk instead of driving alone.
• Support clean energy sources such as solar and wind power
• Plant trees and support conservation efforts

It’s easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference, but the truth is that every little bit helps. Together, we can create a more sustainable future for ourselves and for the planet.

So, let’s take action today and make a difference for a better future, it starts with minor changes, but it all adds up and can make a significant impact. We need to take responsibility for our actions and do our part to protect the planet.”

In this example, the writer gives a clear and specific call to action and encourages the reader to take action to reduce their carbon footprint and protect the planet. By doing this, the writer empowers the reader to take action and enables them to change.

Now, go persuade your students of the importance of perfecting the art of persuasive writing!

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING FACT AND OPINION

This  HUGE 120 PAGE  resource combines four different fact and opinion activities you can undertake as a  WHOLE GROUP  or as  INDEPENDENT READING GROUP TASKS  in either  DIGITAL  or  PRINTABLE TASKS.

20 POPULAR PERSUASIVE ESSAY TOPICS FOR STUDENTS

Writing an effective persuasive essay demonstrates a range of skills that will be of great use in nearly all aspects of life after school.

In essence, if you can influence a person to change their ideas or thoughts on a given topic through how you structure your words and thoughts, you possess a very powerful skill.

Be careful not to rant wildly.  Use facts and other people’s ideas who think similarly to you in your essay to strengthen your concepts.

Your biggest challenge in getting started may be choosing a suitable persuasive essay topic.  These 20 topics for a persuasive essay should make this process a little easier.

• WHY ARE WE FASCINATED WITH CELEBRITIES AND WEALTHY PEOPLE ON TELEVISION AND SOCIAL MEDIA?
• IS IT RIGHT FOR SCHOOLS TO RAISE MONEY BY SELLING CANDY AND UNHEALTHY FOODS TO STUDENTS?
• SHOULD GIRLS BE ALLOWED TO PLAY ON BOYS SPORTING TEAMS?
• IS TEACHING HANDWRITING A WASTE OF TIME IN THIS DAY AND AGE?
• SHOULD THERE BE FAR GREATER RESTRICTIONS AROUND WHAT CAN BE POSTED ON THE INTERNET?
• SHOULD PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES HAVE TO TAKE DRUG TESTS?
• ARE TEENAGE PREGNANCY SHOWS A NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE INFLUENCE ON VIEWERS?
• SHOULD GAMBLING BE PROMOTED IN ANY WAY IN SPORTS EVEN THOUGH IT BRINGS IN LARGE AMOUNTS OF REVENUE?
• SHOULD SPORTING TEAMS THAT LOSE BE REWARDED BY RECEIVING INCENTIVES SUCH AS HIGH DRAFT PICKS AND / OR FINANCIAL BENEFITS?
• SHOULD SHARKS THAT ATTACK PEOPLE BE DESTROYED? SHOULD WE GET INVOLVED IN FOREIGN CONFLICTS AND ISSUES THAT DON’T DIRECTLY AFFECT OUR COUNTRY?
• SHOULD WE GET INVOLVED IN FOREIGN CONFLICTS AND ISSUES THAT DON’T DIRECTLY AFFECT OUR COUNTRY?
• COULD VIDEO GAMES BE CONSIDERED AS A PROFESSIONAL SPORT?
• IF YOU WERE THE LEADER OF YOUR COUNTRY AND HAD A LARGE SURPLUS TO SPEND, WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH IT?
• WHEN SHOULD A PERSON BE CONSIDERED AND TREATED AS AN ADULT?
• SHOULD SMOKING BECOME AN ILLEGAL ACTIVITY?
• SHOULD THE VOTING AGE BE LOWERED?
• DOES PROTECTIVE PADDING IN SPORTS MAKE IT MORE DANGEROUS?
• SHOULD CELL PHONES BE ALLOWED IN THE CLASSROOM?
• IS TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE A WASTE OF TIME?
• SHOULD WE TEACH ETIQUETTE IN SCHOOLS?

PERSUASIVE PROMPTS FOR RELUCTANT WRITERS

If your students need a little more direction and guidance, here are some journal prompts that include aspects to consider.

• Convince us that students would be better off having a three-day weekend .  There are many angles you could take with this, such as letting children maximize their childhood or trying to convince your audience that a four-day school week might actually be more productive.
• Which is the best season?  And why?   You will really need to draw on the benefits of your preferred season and sell them to your audience.  Where possible, highlight the negatives of the competing seasons.  Use lots of figurative language and sensory and emotional connections for this topic.
• Aliens do / or don’t exist?  We can see millions of stars surrounding us just by gazing into the night sky, suggesting alien life should exist, right? Many would argue that if there were aliens we would have seen tangible evidence of them by now.  The only fact is that we just don’t know the answer to this question.  It is your task to try and convince your audience through some research and logic what your point of view is and why.
• Should school uniforms be mandatory? Do your research on this popular and divisive topic and make your position clear on where you stand and why.  Use plenty of real-world examples to support your thoughts and points of view.  
• Should Smartphones be banned in schools?   Whilst this would be a complete nightmare for most students’ social lives, maybe it might make schools more productive places for students to focus and learn.  Pick a position, have at least three solid arguments to support your point of view, and sell them to your audience.

VISUAL JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR PERSUASIVE WRITING

Try these engaging, persuasive prompts with your students to ignite the writing process . Scroll through them.

Persuasive Essay Examples (Student Writing Samples)

Below are a collection of persuasive essay samples.  Click on the image to enlarge and explore them in greater detail.  Please take a moment to read the persuasive texts in detail and the teacher and student guides highlight some of the critical elements of writing a persuasion.

Please understand these student writing samples are not intended to be perfect examples for each age or grade level but a piece of writing for students and teachers to explore together to critically analyze to improve student writing skills and deepen their understanding of persuasive text writing.

We recommend reading the example either a year above or below, as well as the grade you are currently working with, to gain a broader appreciation of this text type.

VIDEO TUTORIALS FOR PERSUASIVE WRITING

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO PERSUASIVE ESSAY WRITING

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

WHERE CAN I FIND A COMPLETE UNIT OF WORK ON HOW TO WRITE PERSUASIVE ESSAYS?

We pride ourselves on being the web’s best resource for teaching students and teachers how to write a persuasive text. We value the fact you have taken the time to read our comprehensive guides to understand the fundamentals of writing skills.

We also understand some of you just don’t have the luxury of time or the resources to create engaging resources exactly when you need them.

If you are time-poor and looking for an in-depth solution that encompasses all of the concepts outlined in this article, I strongly recommend looking at the “ Writing to Persuade and Influence Unit. ”

Working in partnership with Innovative Teaching Ideas , we confidently recommend this resource as an all-in-one solution to teach how to write persuasively.

This unit will find over 140 pages of engaging and innovative teaching ideas.

PERSUASIVE ESSAY WRITING CHECKLIST AND RUBRIC BUNDLE

The Ultimate Guide to Opinion Writing for Students and Teachers

Top 5 Persuasive Writing Techniques for Students

5 Top Persuasive Writing Lesson Plans for Students and Teachers

23 Persuasive writing Topics for High School students

How to Write an Advertisement: A Complete Guide for Students and Teachers

How to Start an Essay with Strong Hooks and Leads

How to Write a Persuasive Essay (This Convinced My Professor!)

Table of contents

Meredith Sell

You can make your essay more persuasive by getting straight to the point.

In fact, that's exactly what we did here, and that's just the first tip of this guide. Throughout this guide, we share the steps needed to prove an argument and create a persuasive essay.

This AI tool helps you improve your essay > This AI tool helps you improve your essay >

Key takeaways: - Proven process to make any argument persuasive - 5-step process to structure arguments - How to use AI to formulate and optimize your essay

Why is being persuasive so difficult?

"Write an essay that persuades the reader of your opinion on a topic of your choice."

You might be staring at an assignment description just like this 👆from your professor. Your computer is open to a blank document, the cursor blinking impatiently. Do I even have opinions?

The persuasive essay can be one of the most intimidating academic papers to write: not only do you need to identify a narrow topic and research it, but you also have to come up with a position on that topic that you can back up with research while simultaneously addressing different viewpoints.

That’s a big ask. And let’s be real: most opinion pieces in major news publications don’t fulfill these requirements.

The upside? By researching and writing your own opinion, you can learn how to better formulate not only an argument but the actual positions you decide to hold. 

Here, we break down exactly how to write a persuasive essay. We’ll start by taking a step that’s key for every piece of writing—defining the terms.

What Is a Persuasive Essay?

A persuasive essay is exactly what it sounds like: an essay that persuades . Over the course of several paragraphs or pages, you’ll use researched facts and logic to convince the reader of your opinion on a particular topic and discredit opposing opinions.

While you’ll spend some time explaining the topic or issue in question, most of your essay will flesh out your viewpoint and the evidence that supports it.

The 5 Must-Have Steps of a Persuasive Essay

If you’re intimidated by the idea of writing an argument, use this list to break your process into manageable chunks. Tackle researching and writing one element at a time, and then revise your essay so that it flows smoothly and coherently with every component in the optimal place.

1. A topic or issue to argue

This is probably the hardest step. You need to identify a topic or issue that is narrow enough to cover in the length of your piece—and is also arguable from more than one position. Your topic must call for an opinion , and not be a simple fact .

It might be helpful to walk through this process:

• Identify a random topic
• Ask a question about the topic that involves a value claim or analysis to answer
• Answer the question

That answer is your opinion.

Let’s consider some examples, from silly to serious:

Topic: Dolphins and mermaids

Question: In a mythical match, who would win: a dolphin or a mermaid?

Answer/Opinion: The mermaid would win in a match against a dolphin.

Topic: Autumn

Question: Which has a better fall: New England or Colorado?

Answer/Opinion: Fall is better in New England than Colorado.

Topic: Electric transportation options

Question: Would it be better for an urban dweller to buy an electric bike or an electric car?

Answer/Opinion: An electric bike is a better investment than an electric car.

Your turn: Walk through the three-step process described above to identify your topic and your tentative opinion. You may want to start by brainstorming a list of topics you find interesting and then going use the three-step process to find the opinion that would make the best essay topic.

2. An unequivocal thesis statement

If you walked through our three-step process above, you already have some semblance of a thesis—but don’t get attached too soon! 

A solid essay thesis is best developed through the research process. You shouldn’t land on an opinion before you know the facts. So press pause. Take a step back. And dive into your research.

You’ll want to learn:

• The basic facts of your topic. How long does fall last in New England vs. Colorado? What trees do they have? What colors do those trees turn?
• The facts specifically relevant to your question. Is there any science on how the varying colors of fall influence human brains and moods?
• What experts or other noteworthy and valid sources say about the question you’re considering. Has a well-known arborist waxed eloquent on the beauty of New England falls?

As you learn the different viewpoints people have on your topic, pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of existing arguments. Is anyone arguing the perspective you’re leaning toward? Do you find their arguments convincing? What do you find unsatisfying about the various arguments? 

Allow the research process to change your mind and/or refine your thinking on the topic. Your opinion may change entirely or become more specific based on what you learn.

Once you’ve done enough research to feel confident in your understanding of the topic and your opinion on it, craft your thesis. 

Your thesis statement should be clear and concise. It should directly state your viewpoint on the topic, as well as the basic case for your thesis.

Thesis 1: In a mythical match, the mermaid would overcome the dolphin due to one distinct advantage: her ability to breathe underwater.

Thesis 2: The full spectrum of color displayed on New England hillsides is just one reason why fall in the northeast is better than in Colorado.

Thesis 3: In addition to not adding to vehicle traffic, electric bikes are a better investment than electric cars because they’re cheaper and require less energy to accomplish the same function of getting the rider from point A to point B.

Your turn: Dive into the research process with a radar up for the arguments your sources are making about your topic. What are the most convincing cases? Should you stick with your initial opinion or change it up? Write your fleshed-out thesis statement.

3. Evidence to back up your thesis

This is a typical place for everyone from undergrads to politicians to get stuck, but the good news is, if you developed your thesis from research, you already have a good bit of evidence to make your case.

Go back through your research notes and compile a list of every …

… or other piece of information that supports your thesis. 

This info can come from research studies you found in scholarly journals, government publications, news sources, encyclopedias, or other credible sources (as long as they fit your professor’s standards).

As you put this list together, watch for any gaps or weak points. Are you missing information on how electric cars versus electric bicycles charge or how long their batteries last? Did you verify that dolphins are, in fact, mammals and can’t breathe underwater like totally-real-and-not-at-all-fake 😉mermaids can? Track down that information.

Next, organize your list. Group the entries so that similar or closely related information is together, and as you do that, start thinking through how to articulate the individual arguments to support your case. 

Depending on the length of your essay, each argument may get only a paragraph or two of space. As you think through those specific arguments, consider what order to put them in. You’ll probably want to start with the simplest argument and work up to more complicated ones so that the arguments can build on each other. 

Your turn: Organize your evidence and write a rough draft of your arguments. Play around with the order to find the most compelling way to argue your case.

4. Rebuttals to disprove opposing theses

You can’t just present the evidence to support your case and totally ignore other viewpoints. To persuade your readers, you’ll need to address any opposing ideas they may hold about your topic. 

You probably found some holes in the opposing views during your research process. Now’s your chance to expose those holes. 

Take some time (and space) to: describe the opposing views and show why those views don’t hold up. You can accomplish this using both logic and facts.

Is a perspective based on a faulty assumption or misconception of the truth? Shoot it down by providing the facts that disprove the opinion.

Is another opinion drawn from bad or unsound reasoning? Show how that argument falls apart.

Some cases may truly be only a matter of opinion, but you still need to articulate why you don’t find the opposing perspective convincing.

Yes, a dolphin might be stronger than a mermaid, but as a mammal, the dolphin must continually return to the surface for air. A mermaid can breathe both underwater and above water, which gives her a distinct advantage in this mythical battle.

While the Rocky Mountain views are stunning, their limited colors—yellow from aspen trees and green from various evergreens—leaves the autumn-lover less than thrilled. The rich reds and oranges and yellows of the New England fall are more satisfying and awe-inspiring.

But what about longer trips that go beyond the city center into the suburbs and beyond? An electric bike wouldn’t be great for those excursions. Wouldn’t an electric car be the better choice then? 

Certainly, an electric car would be better in these cases than a gas-powered car, but if most of a person’s trips are in their hyper-local area, the electric bicycle is a more environmentally friendly option for those day-to-day outings. That person could then participate in a carshare or use public transit, a ride-sharing app, or even a gas-powered car for longer trips—and still use less energy overall than if they drove an electric car for hyper-local and longer area trips.

Your turn: Organize your rebuttal research and write a draft of each one.

5. A convincing conclusion

You have your arguments and rebuttals. You’ve proven your thesis is rock-solid. Now all you have to do is sum up your overall case and give your final word on the subject. 

Don’t repeat everything you’ve already said. Instead, your conclusion should logically draw from the arguments you’ve made to show how they coherently prove your thesis. You’re pulling everything together and zooming back out with a better understanding of the what and why of your thesis. 

A dolphin may never encounter a mermaid in the wild, but if it were to happen, we know how we’d place our bets. Long hair and fish tail, for the win.

For those of us who relish 50-degree days, sharp air, and the vibrant colors of fall, New England offers a season that’s cozier, longer-lasting, and more aesthetically pleasing than “colorful” Colorado. A leaf-peeper’s paradise.

When most of your trips from day to day are within five miles, the more energy-efficient—and yes, cost-efficient—choice is undoubtedly the electric bike. So strap on your helmet, fire up your pedals, and two-wheel away to your next destination with full confidence that you made the right decision for your wallet and the environment.

3 Quick Tips for Writing a Strong Argument

Once you have a draft to work with, use these tips to refine your argument and make sure you’re not losing readers for avoidable reasons.

1. Choose your words thoughtfully.

If you want to win people over to your side, don’t write in a way that shuts your opponents down. Avoid making abrasive or offensive statements. Instead, use a measured, reasonable tone. Appeal to shared values, and let your facts and logic do the hard work of changing people’s minds.

Choose words with AI

You can use AI to turn your general point into a readable argument. Then, you can paraphrase each sentence and choose between competing arguments generated by the AI, until your argument is well-articulated and concise.

2. Prioritize accuracy (and avoid fallacies).

Make sure the facts you use are actually factual. You don’t want to build your argument on false or disproven information. Use the most recent, respected research. Make sure you don’t misconstrue study findings. And when you’re building your case, avoid logical fallacies that undercut your argument.

A few common fallacies to watch out for:

• Strawman: Misrepresenting or oversimplifying an opposing argument to make it easier to refute.
• Appeal to ignorance: Arguing that a certain claim must be true because it hasn’t been proven false.
• Bandwagon: Assumes that if a group of people, experts, etc., agree with a claim, it must be true.
• Hasty generalization: Using a few examples, rather than substantial evidence, to make a sweeping claim.
• Appeal to authority: Overly relying on opinions of people who have authority of some kind.

The strongest arguments rely on trustworthy information and sound logic.

Research and add citations with AI

We recently wrote a three part piece on researching using AI, so be sure to check it out . Going through an organized process of researching and noting your sources correctly will make sure your written text is more accurate.

3. Persuasive essay structure

If you’re building a house, you start with the foundation and go from there. It’s the same with an argument. You want to build from the ground up: provide necessary background information, then your thesis. Then, start with the simplest part of your argument and build up in terms of complexity and the aspect of your thesis that the argument is tackling.

A consistent, internal logic will make it easier for the reader to follow your argument. Plus, you’ll avoid confusing your reader and you won’t be unnecessarily redundant.

The essay structure usually includes the following parts:

• Intro - Hook, Background information, Thesis statement
• Topic sentence #1 , with supporting facts or stats
• Concluding sentence
• Topic sentence #2 , with supporting facts or stats
• Concluding sentence Topic sentence #3 , with supporting facts or stats
• Conclusion - Thesis and main points restated, call to action, thought provoking ending

Are You Ready to Write?

Persuasive essays are a great way to hone your research, writing, and critical thinking skills. Approach this assignment well, and you’ll learn how to form opinions based on information (not just ideas) and make arguments that—if they don’t change minds—at least win readers’ respect. ‍

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Dear Librarian: Writing a Persuasive Letter

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

In Emily's Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary, the character of Mama writes to the State Librarian, asking for help starting a library in their town. Inspired by the actions in Cleary's book, students write to their school librarian, requesting that a specific text be added to the school library collection. Students use persuasive writing skills as well as online tools to write letters stating their cases. Students then have an opportunity to share their letters with the librarian.

Featured Resources

• Persuasion Map Printout : This printable sheet guides students in mapping out their thesis, main reasons, examples, and conclusion for a persuasive writing assignment.
• Persuasion Rubric : Use this rubric to assess students' persuasive letters.
• Letter Generator : This online tool allows students to read about the parts of a letter. They can then write and print their own friendly or business letter.

From Theory to Practice

In her book, Family Message Journals: Teaching Writing through Family Involvement , Julie Wollman-Bonilla states the importance of students becoming comfortable as readers and writers. Wollman-Bonilla outlines the effect that reading and writing, including persuasive writing, have on students. She says, "Writing is a powerful tool for influencing others, getting what you want, and problem-solving. In order to write in ways that meet their needs, children must think about how to get their readers' attention and be persuasive and clear. Learning to write persuasively is a valuable, life-long skill. In addition, children need to write for real purposes and audiences if they are to learn that writing is personally meaningful and a powerful communication tool." Here, students are writing to a real audience (the librarian) and for a real purpose (to convince the librarian to add their selected book to the library collection). Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 6. Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
• 12. Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Materials and Technology

• Emily's Runaway Imagination or another selected text
• Persuasion Map Printout
• Persuasion Rubric
• Options for Emily's Runaway Imagination

Preparation

• This lesson plan can be implemented after a class reading of the Beverly Cleary book Emily's Runaway Imagination, or the lesson can be taught alone.
• Coordinate this activity with the school librarian, setting up time for a class visit. If desired, the librarian might talk to the class before they work on their letters to discuss how decisions are made on purchasing for the library.
• Make appropriate number of copies of the Persuasion Map Printout and  Persuasion Rubric .
• Test the Persuasion Map and Letter Generator on your computers to familiarize yourself with the tools and ensure that you have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in from the technical support page.

Student Objectives

Students will:

• develop and support a position on a particular book by writing a persuasive letter about their chosen title.
• use a guide to help them organize their persuasive ideas into written form.
• outline a persuasive piece that expresses points in a clear, logical sequence so the reader can follow their reasoning.
• publish their persuasive piece as a letter.

Session One

• What makes it your favorite book?
• How did you first hear about that book?
• Have you recommended that book to others?
• Did you enjoy the book?
• Did it live up to your expectations?
• What did Emily think of Black Beauty , after she was finally able to read it?
• Ask students if they have ever looked for a book at the library and found that it was checked out or that the library did not own a copy. Ask student volunteers to share how such an experience made them feel.
• Invite students to problem solve, focusing on the question, “If there is a book that you really want for the library, what can you do?” Students’ responses will vary. If someone does not volunteer that you could write a letter to the librarian asking for a copy to be purchased for the library, ask some leading questions to lead them to the response. If you have read Emily's Runaway Imagination as a class, remind students that Emily’s mother does: she writes a letter to the State Librarian requesting books for their new library.
• Explain that students will write a similar persuasive letter to their librarian, requesting that a book they are interested in be added to the library collection.
• Introduce the idea of persuasive writing by discussing the  Persuasion Map Printout , which walks through the components of a persuasive piece of writing.
• After students have been introduced to the  Persuasion Map Printout , share the  Persuasion Rubric so they understand the target for the project and what is expected of them.
• Answer any questions that the students have about persuasive writing or their persuasive writing project.

Session Two

• Type your name and topic on the opening screen.
• Read through the prompts, showing the connection between the questions on screen and those on the Persuasion Map Printout .
• Show how to use the small map in the upper right corner to navigate among the prompts.
• Demonstrate how to print the finished maps before exiting, stressing that students cannot save their work online.
• Answer any questions that students have about the online tool and their assignment.
• Allow students the rest of the session to organize their ideas, and create finished copies of their work using the Persuasion Map .
• Explain that students will use these notes during the next session to create their letters.

Session Three

• Post the name and address of the librarian(s) that students will write to on the board for use during the session.
• Using their printed Persuasion Map as a guide, ask students to write their persuasive letters, requesting that a book they are interested in be added to the library collection.
• Demonstrate the Letter Generator , using the introductory information to discuss the parts of a letter and to help students decide whether to write business or friendly letters.
• Be sure that you demonstrate how to work through the different parts of the online tool, especially how to return to sections to edit them once you reach the preview stage.
• Allow students the rest of the session to organize their ideas, and create finished copies of their work using the Letter Generator .
• Keep the  Persuasion Rubric posted so students can make sure that they include all necessary components.
• Explain that students will share their letters with the class during the next session.

Session Four

• When students have completed their letters, invite them to share with the class.
• The teacher should assess the final letter using the  Persuasion Rubric .
• Arrange for a visit to the library to deliver the letters to the librarian.
• Students should be prepared to answer any questions the librarian may have.
• If the librarian is persuaded, like in Emily's Runaway Imagination , arrange for a party to celebrate the new books.
• Choose from one of the activities to further explore the Beverly Cleary book, Emily's Runaway Imagination .
• Do an author study on Beverly Cleary. Visit The World of Beverly Cleary for details on the author and her books, as well as character profiles, online games, and teaching resources.
• Explore the library further by visiting this ReadWriteThink Calendar Entry on National Library Card Month, which provides additional activities related to libraries and library cards.

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Assess students’ persuasive writing piece using the rubric .
• Respond to the content and quality of students’ arguments and reasons as they share their project with the librarian. Look for indications that the student provides supporting evidence for the reflections, thus applying the lessons learned from the work with the Persuasion Map .
• Calendar Activities
• Strategy Guides
• Student Interactives
• Lesson Plans

Students learn more about libraries as part of National Library Week.

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters for both styles of correspondence.

Students analyze rhetorical strategies in online editorials, building knowledge of strategies and awareness of local and national issues. This lesson teaches students connections between subject, writer, and audience and how rhetorical strategies are used in everyday writing.

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• Kindergarten K

4th grade writing

by: Jessica Kelmon | Updated: August 4, 2022

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In fourth grade, study skills play an important role in your child’s writing. Kids do research using multiple sources. They also learn to take notes on what they research, read. and hear. And even stories are more advanced, with more developed characters who show their feelings and react to what happens. And perhaps most important, your child is expected to analyze a book’s structure, logic, details, and evidence in their writing. It’s all pretty impressive!

Building 4th grade study skills

This year taking notes is an important skill. Fourth graders are expected to use books, periodicals, websites, and other digital sources to conduct research projects — both on their own and as part of group work with peers. Your child should keep track of all the sources they check — noting what they learn, the name of the source and page number or url so they can find it again and create a source list or bibliography later.

Also, taking notes while reading fiction will help your child when it comes time to analyze what they’ve read or to give an in-depth description of a character, setting, or story event drawing on specific details.

Check out this related worksheet: •  Finding key points

bttr, better, best!

Last year’s prewriting step — planning — becomes more essential in your child’s writing process this year. Before your child sits down to write, they should use their organized notes to help create the structure of whatever they’re writing. While planning , your child may brainstorm ideas for a story or decide how to organize facts into a cohesive set of points. The more knowledge your child builds during the prewriting stage, the easier it will be to write. Encourage reading and rereading, taking notes, finding additional sources, discussing aloud how new knowledge fits in with what your child knew before, and visually organizing what they plan to write about. After the first draft is written, the teacher and possibly other students will offer feedback: asking questions to elicit new details or clarify an argument or suggest new sources of information. They should check that there’s a clear introduction and conclusion, and that the order of points or events makes sense. Your child will then do a revision (or two), adding, reordering, and refining their writing to show deep understanding.

After making revisions, your child does a final edit focusing on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and strengthening word choices. These steps — planning, writing a first draft, revising, and editing the final piece — help fourth graders understand that research, organizing, clarifying ideas, and improving grammar and presentation are all essential to strong writing.

See what your fourth grade writing looks like

Fourth grade writing: opinion pieces

Your child’s opinions always need to be supported by evidence. Persuasive writing should start by clearly introducing an opinion on a topic. To support their opinion, kids need to present their argument, which is a list of reasons why they hold that opinion. Each of their reasons needs to be supported by facts and details (a.k.a. evidence). After presenting all of their research-supported reasons, kids should close their arguments with a concluding statement or paragraph that sums up how their evidence supports their opinion.

Check out this example of good fourth grade opinion writing: • “ Zoos should close ”

Fourth grade writing: informative writing

This year, your child’s informative writing gets more organized, with headers, illustrations and even multimedia components to support specific points. To begin, your child should introduce the topic. Then they should use facts, definitions, details, quotes, examples, and other information to develop their topic into a few clear, well thought-out paragraphs. Your fourth grader should use advanced linking words (e.g. also, another, for example, because ) to form compound and complex sentences connecting their research and ideas to the point they’re making. Finally, to wrap it up, your child should have a conclusion — either a statement or, if necessary, a section labeled conclusion.

Check out these three examples of good fourth grade informational writing: • “ John Cabot and the Rediscovery of North America ” • “ Big Book of Evolution ” • “ Book report: A Tale of Despereaux ”

Can your fourth grader write an informational essay?

Fourth grade writing: narratives

A narrative means writing a story. This year your child will be expected to use storytelling techniques, descriptive details, and clear sequences to tell compelling tales. Whether inspired by a favorite book, real events, or your child’s imagination, your child’s story should use dialogue, descriptive words, and transitional language. Look for precise language and sensory details that bring characters to life. Finally, your child should keep pacing and sequence of events in mind. The events should unfold naturally, bringing the story to a natural conclusion. Are surprise endings okay? Sure… so long as the details and events plausibly lead there.

Check out this related worksheet: •  Putting sentences in order

Gettin’ good at grammar

You may want to review all those parts of speech your child learned last year because fourth grade grammar is expected to be quite accurate. Your child should know relative pronouns (e.g. who, whose, whom, which, that ), relative adverbs (e.g. where, when, why ), adjective ordering (e.g. short dark hair and small red bag ), descriptive prepositional phrases (e.g. in the air, down the block, on the grass ), progressive past, present, and future verbs (e.g. I was walking, I am walking, I will be walking ), and verbs used with other verbs to express mood or tense (aka modal auxiliaries, e.g. can, may, must, should, would ). Also, your child needs to master the distinctions between frequently confused words like to , too , and two and there , their , and they’re . Finally, your child should be able to recognize and correct run-on sentences.

Check out these related worksheets: •  Prepositions •  Compound sentences •  Punctuating a paragraph •  Its or it’s?

Learning to use language precisely

This means:

• Recognizing and explaining common idioms (e.g. bending over backwards )
• Distinguishing between similes and metaphors (e.g. quiet as a mouse and the sun is a yellow beach ball ).
• Identifying and using synonyms and antonyms
• Using increasingly specific words in writing (e.g. glamorous instead of pretty, pre-dawn instead of morning, quizzed instead of asked )

Your fourth grader should now be using relevant academic words in informational writing and research reports. Although accurate spelling should be the norm in fourth grade, when faced with spelling more academic words, your child should use a dictionary and thesaurus (print and digital versions).

Check out these related worksheets: • 4th grade weekly spelling lists • Making metaphors • Simile or cliché?

Sharing their work

Most classrooms will encourage (if not require) kids to use technology to produce and publish their writing. Your fourth grader should be able to type up to a full page in one sitting. While teachers should be there to help, your child should be doing the work. Students will also be expected to interact with peers about each other’s work. What might that look like? Your child might read a classmates’ published work online and comment on it, or cite a peer’s work when answering a question in class.

Updated August 2022

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Persuasive Essay About Smoking - Making a Powerful Argument with Examples

Are you looking to improve your persuasive writing skills?

One of the best ways to do that is by reading persuasive essay examples. These examples can show you how to structure your arguments effectively.

But finding good examples can be a challenge. Don't worry, though – we've gathered some helpful persuasive essays for you right here!

So, if you're in search of persuasive essay examples to help you write your own, you're in the right place. 

Keep reading this blog to explore various examples

• 1. Persuasive Essay Examples For Students
• 2. Persuasive Essay Examples for Different Formats
• 3. Persuasive Essay Outline Examples
• 4. Persuasive Essay Format Example
• 5. How to Write A Persuasive Essay With Examples
• 6. How to End a Persuasive Essay Examples
• 7. Catchy Persuasive Essay Topics

Persuasive Essay Examples For Students

A persuasive essay aims to convince the reader of the author’s point of view. 

To find the right path for your essay, it's helpful to go through some examples. Similarly, good essay examples also help to avoid any potential pitfalls and offer clear information to the readers to adopt. 

Here are some persuasive essay examples pdf:

3rd-grade Persuasive Essay Example

4th-grade Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay Example 5th-grade pdf

Persuasive Essay Examples for 6th Grade pdf

7th-grade Persuasive Essay Example

8th-grade Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay Examples Grade 10

11th-grade Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Writing Example For Kids

Persuasive Essay Examples High School

The following are good persuasive essay examples for high school. Having a look at them will help you understand better.

High-school Persuasive Essay Example

Examples of Persuasive Essay in Everyday Life

Persuasive Essay Examples for Middle School

Check out these persuasive essay examples for middle school to get a comprehensive idea of the format structure. 

Persuasive Essay Examples Middle School

Short Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay Examples for College Students

Essay writing at the college level becomes more difficult and complicated. We have provided you with top-notch college persuasive and argumentative essay examples here.

Read them to understand the essay writing process easily. 

Persuasive Essay Examples College

Higher English Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay About Smoking

Argumentative and Persuasive Examples

Persuasive Essay Examples For University

It becomes even more challenging to draft a perfect essay at the university level. Have a look at the below examples of a persuasive essay to get an idea of writing one.

University Persuasive Essay Example

5 Paragraph Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay Examples for Different Formats

A persuasive essay can be written in several formats. For instance, you can write the usual 5-paragraph essay, or even something longer or shorter.

Below are a few sample essays in various common formats.

Persuasive Essay Examples 5 Paragraph

Persuasive Essay Examples 3 Paragraph

Short Persuasive Essay Examples

These examples tell you how to remain convincing and persuasive regardless of the essay format you use.

Persuasive Essay Outline Examples

Creating an impressive outline is the most important step for writing a persuasive essay. It helps to organize thoughts and make the writing process easier.

 A standard outline consists of the following sections.

• Introduction
• Body Paragraphs

Have a look at the following persuasive essay outline template examples.

Persuasive Essay Outline

Persuasive Essay Template

Persuasive Essay Format Example

A persuasive essay outline is bound to follow a specific format and structure. The main elements of a persuasive essay format are as follows.

• Font: Times New Roman, Georgia, or Arial
• Font Size: 16pt for the headlines and 12pt for the rest of the text
• Alignment: Justified
• Spacing: Double spacing
• Word Count: It usually contains 500 to 2000 words

How to Write A Persuasive Essay With Examples

Planning an essay before starting writing is essential to produce an organized and structured writing piece. So, it is better to understand the concept beforehand to impress your instructor.  

The below example will show a good starting to an essay.

A Good Start for a Persuasive Essay - Short Example

How to Start a Persuasive Essay Examples

The introduction is the first part of an essay and your first chance to grab the reader's attention. It should clearly state the essay's purpose and give the reader a clear idea of what to expect.

A compelling persuasive essay introduction must have the following elements.

• Hook statement + topic
• A strong thesis statement
• Your arguments

Here are some examples of persuasive essay introductions to help you make a compelling start:

Introduction Persuasive Essay Example

Persuasive Essay Thesis Statement Examples

Persuasive Essay Hook Examples

How to End a Persuasive Essay Examples

Just like the introduction, the conclusion of the persuasive essay is equally important. It is considered as the last impression of your writing piece to the audience.

A good conclusion paragraph must include the following aspects.

• Restate the thesis statement or hypothesis
• Summarize the key arguments
• Avoid being obvious
• Include a call to action

Have a look at the document to explore the sample conclusions of a persuasive essay.

Conclusion Persuasive Essay Examples

Catchy Persuasive Essay Topics

Now that you have read some good examples, it's time to write your own persuasive essay.

But what should you write about? You can write persuasive essays about any topic, from business and online education to controversial topics like abortion , gun control , and more.

Here is a list of ten persuasive essay topics that you can use to grab your reader's attention and make them think:

• Should the government increase taxes to fund public health initiatives?
• Is the current education system effective in preparing students for college and the workplace?
• Should there be tighter gun control laws?
• Should schools have uniforms or a dress code?
• Are standardized tests an accurate measure of student performance?
• Should students be required to take physical education courses?
• Is undocumented immigration a legitimate cause for concern in the United States?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in today’s society?
• How much, if any, regulation should there be on technology companies?
• Is the death penalty an appropriate form of punishment for serious crimes?

Check out two examples on similar topics:

Political Persuasive Essay Examples

Persuasive Essay Examples About Life

Need more topic ideas? Check out our extensive list of unique persuasive essay topics and get started!

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40 Strong Persuasive Writing Examples (Essays, Speeches, Ads, and More)

Learn from the experts.

The more we read, the better writers we become. Teaching students to write strong persuasive essays should always start with reading some top-notch models. This round-up of persuasive writing examples includes famous speeches, influential ad campaigns, contemporary reviews of famous books, and more. Use them to inspire your students to write their own essays. (Need persuasive essay topics? Check out our list of interesting persuasive essay ideas here! )

• Persuasive Essays
• Persuasive Speeches
• Advertising Campaigns

Persuasive Essay Writing Examples

From the earliest days of print, authors have used persuasive essays to try to sway others to their own point of view. Check out these top persuasive essay writing examples.

Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf

Sample lines: “Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?”

The Crisis by Thomas Paine

Sample lines: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

Sample lines: “As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

Letter From a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sample lines: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.'”

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Sample lines: “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”

Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Roger Ebert

Sample lines: “‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime.”

The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin

Sample lines: “Methinks I hear some of you say, must a man afford himself no leisure? I will tell thee, my friend, what Poor Richard says, employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never; so that, as Poor Richard says, a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things.”

The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sample lines: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.”

Open Letter to the Kansas School Board by Bobby Henderson

Sample lines: “I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. … Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. … We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him. It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories.”

Open Letter to the United Nations by Niels Bohr

Sample lines: “Humanity will, therefore, be confronted with dangers of unprecedented character unless, in due time, measures can be taken to forestall a disastrous competition in such formidable armaments and to establish an international control of the manufacture and use of the powerful materials.”

Persuasive Speech Writing Examples

Many persuasive speeches are political in nature, often addressing subjects like human rights. Here are some of history’s most well-known persuasive writing examples in the form of speeches.

I Have a Dream by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sample lines: “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Woodrow Wilson’s War Message to Congress, 1917

Sample lines: “There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

Chief Seattle’s 1854 Oration

Sample lines: “I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.”

Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, Hillary Rodham Clinton

Sample lines: “What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well. … If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”

I Am Prepared to Die, Nelson Mandela

Sample lines: “Above all, My Lord, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on color, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another. … This then is what the ANC is fighting. Our struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by our own suffering and our own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.”

The Struggle for Human Rights by Eleanor Roosevelt

Sample lines: “It is my belief, and I am sure it is also yours, that the struggle for democracy and freedom is a critical struggle, for their preservation is essential to the great objective of the United Nations to maintain international peace and security. Among free men the end cannot justify the means. We know the patterns of totalitarianism—the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church to support autocratic authority; these are the age-old patterns against which men have struggled for 3,000 years. These are the signs of reaction, retreat, and retrogression. The United Nations must hold fast to the heritage of freedom won by the struggle of its people; it must help us to pass it on to generations to come.”

Freedom From Fear by Aung San Suu Kyi

Sample lines: “Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.”

Harvey Milk’s “The Hope” Speech

Sample lines: “Some people are satisfied. And some people are not. You see there is a major difference—and it remains a vital difference—between a friend and a gay person, a friend in office and a gay person in office. Gay people have been slandered nationwide. We’ve been tarred and we’ve been brushed with the picture of pornography. In Dade County, we were accused of child molestation. It is not enough anymore just to have friends represent us, no matter how good that friend may be.”

The Union and the Strike, Cesar Chavez

Sample lines: “We are showing our unity in our strike. Our strike is stopping the work in the fields; our strike is stopping ships that would carry grapes; our strike is stopping the trucks that would carry the grapes. Our strike will stop every way the grower makes money until we have a union contract that guarantees us a fair share of the money he makes from our work! We are a union and we are strong and we are striking to force the growers to respect our strength!”

Nobel Lecture by Malala Yousafzai

Sample lines: “The world can no longer accept that basic education is enough. Why do leaders accept that for children in developing countries, only basic literacy is sufficient, when their own children do homework in algebra, mathematics, science, and physics? Leaders must seize this opportunity to guarantee a free, quality, primary and secondary education for every child. Some will say this is impractical, or too expensive, or too hard. Or maybe even impossible. But it is time the world thinks bigger.”   

Persuasive Writing Examples in Advertising Campaigns

Ads are prime persuasive writing examples. You can flip open any magazine or watch TV for an hour or two to see sample after sample of persuasive language. Here are some of the most popular ad campaigns of all time, with links to articles explaining why they were so successful.

Nike: Just Do It

The iconic swoosh with the simple tagline has persuaded millions to buy their kicks from Nike and Nike alone. Teamed with pro sports-star endorsements, this campaign is one for the ages. Blinkist offers an opinion on what made it work.

Dove: Real Beauty

Beauty brand Dove changed the game by choosing “real” women to tell their stories instead of models. They used relatable images and language to make connections, and inspired other brands to try the same concept. Learn why Global Brands considers this one a true success story.

Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef?

Today’s kids are too young to remember the cranky old woman demanding to know where the beef was on her fast-food hamburger. But in the 1980s, it was a catchphrase that sold millions of Wendy’s burgers. Learn from Better Marketing how this ad campaign even found its way into the 1984 presidential debate.

De Beers: A Diamond Is Forever

A diamond engagement ring has become a standard these days, but the tradition isn’t as old as you might think. In fact, it was De Beers jewelry company’s 1948 campaign that created the modern engagement ring trend. The Drum has the whole story of this sparkling campaign.

Volkswagen: Think Small

Americans have always loved big cars. So in the 1960s, when Volkswagen wanted to introduce their small cars to a bigger market, they had a problem. The clever “Think Small” campaign gave buyers clever reasons to consider these models, like “If you run out of gas, it’s easy to push.” Learn how advertisers interested American buyers in little cars at Visual Rhetoric.

American Express: Don’t Leave Home Without It

AmEx was once better known for traveler’s checks than credit cards, and the original slogan was “Don’t leave home without them.” A simple word change convinced travelers that American Express was the credit card they needed when they headed out on adventures. Discover more about this persuasive campaign from Medium.

Skittles: Taste the Rainbow

These candy ads are weird and intriguing and probably not for everyone. But they definitely get you thinking, and that often leads to buying. Learn more about why these wacky ads are successful from The Drum.

Maybelline: Maybe She’s Born With It

Smart wordplay made this ad campaign slogan an instant hit. The ads teased, “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” (So many literary devices all in one phrase!) Fashionista has more on this beauty campaign.

Coca-Cola: Share a Coke

Seeing their own name on a bottle made teens more likely to want to buy a Coke. What can that teach us about persuasive writing in general? It’s an interesting question to consider. Learn more about the “Share a Coke” campaign from Digital Vidya.

Always: #LikeaGirl

Talk about the power of words! This Always campaign turned the derogatory phrase “like a girl” on its head, and the world embraced it. Storytelling is an important part of persuasive writing, and these ads really do it well. Medium has more on this stereotype-bashing campaign.   

Editorial Persuasive Writing Examples

Newspaper editors or publishers use editorials to share their personal opinions. Noted politicians, experts, or pundits may also offer their opinions on behalf of the editors or publishers. Here are a couple of older well-known editorials, along with a selection from current newspapers.

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1897)

Sample lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”

What’s the Matter With Kansas? (1896)

Sample lines: “Oh, this IS a state to be proud of! We are a people who can hold up our heads! What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are ‘just ordinary clodhoppers, but they know more in a minute about finance than John Sherman,’ we need more men … who hate prosperity, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street.”

America Can Have Democracy or Political Violence. Not Both. (The New York Times)

Sample lines: “The nation is not powerless to stop a slide toward deadly chaos. If institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life, organized violence in the service of political objectives can still be pushed to the fringes. When a faction of one of the country’s two main political parties embraces extremism, that makes thwarting it both more difficult and more necessary. A well-functioning democracy demands it.”

The Booster Isn’t Perfect, But Still Can Help Against COVID (The Washington Post)

Sample lines: “The booster shots are still free, readily available and work better than the previous boosters even as the virus evolves. Much still needs to be done to build better vaccines that protect longer and against more variants, including those that might emerge in the future. But it is worth grabbing the booster that exists today, the jab being a small price for any measure that can help keep COVID at bay.”

If We Want Wildlife To Thrive in L.A., We Have To Share Our Neighborhoods With Them (Los Angeles Times)

Sample lines: “If there are no corridors for wildlife movement and if excessive excavation of dirt to build bigger, taller houses erodes the slope of a hillside, then we are slowly destroying wildlife habitat. For those people fretting about what this will do to their property values—isn’t open space, trees, and wildlife an amenity in these communities?”   

Persuasive Review Writing Examples

Book or movie reviews are more great persuasive writing examples. Look for those written by professionals for the strongest arguments and writing styles. Here are reviews of some popular books and movies by well-known critics to use as samples.

The Great Gatsby (The Chicago Tribune, 1925)

Sample lines: “What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false: It is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (The Washington Post, 1999)

Sample lines: “Obviously, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone should make any modern 11-year-old a very happy reader. The novel moves quickly, packs in everything from a boa constrictor that winks to a melancholy Zen-spouting centaur to an owl postal system, and ends with a scary surprise. Yet it is, essentially, a light-hearted thriller, interrupted by occasional seriousness (the implications of Harry’s miserable childhood, a moral about the power of love).”

Twilight (The Telegraph, 2009)

Sample lines: “No secret, of course, at whom this book is aimed, and no doubt, either, that it has hit its mark. The four Twilight novels are not so much enjoyed, as devoured, by legions of young female fans worldwide. That’s not to say boys can’t enjoy these books; it’s just that the pages of heart-searching dialogue between Edward and Bella may prove too long on chat and too short on action for the average male reader.”

To Kill a Mockingbird (Time, 1960)

Sample lines: “Author Lee, 34, an Alabaman, has written her first novel with all of the tactile brilliance and none of the preciosity generally supposed to be standard swamp-warfare issue for Southern writers. The novel is an account of an awakening to good and evil, and a faint catechistic flavor may have been inevitable. But it is faint indeed; novelist Lee’s prose has an edge that cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life.”

The Diary of Anne Frank (The New York Times, 1952)

Sample lines: “And this quality brings it home to any family in the world today. Just as the Franks lived in momentary fear of the Gestapo’s knock on their hidden door, so every family today lives in fear of the knock of war. Anne’s diary is a great affirmative answer to the life-question of today, for she shows how ordinary people, within this ordeal, consistently hold to the greater human values.”   

What are your favorite persuasive writing examples to use with students? Come share your ideas in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, the big list of essay topics for high school (120+ ideas) ..

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101 Interesting Persuasive Essay Topics for Kids and Teens

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EL Education Curriculum

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• ELA G4:M3:U3:L7

Writing Opinion Texts: Drafting the Introduction of a Broadside

In this lesson, daily learning targets, ongoing assessment.

• Technology and Multimedia

Supporting English Language Learners

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These are the CCS Standards addressed in this lesson:

• W.4.1: Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information.
• W.4.1a: Introduce a topic or text clearly, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure in which related ideas are grouped to support the writer's purpose.
• L.4.1: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
• L.4.1e: Form and use prepositional phrases.
• L.4.1f: Produce complete sentences, recognizing and correcting inappropriate fragments and run-ons.
• I can identify prepositional phrases in a sentence. (L.4.1e)
• I can write an introductory paragraph for my broadside giving context on the issue and clearly stating my opinion. (W.4.1a)
• Introduction to Patriot broadside (W.4.1a)
• Strategically pair students for work in Opening A.
• Prepare the Organizing the Model: Introductory Paragraph strips so each pair of students has one strip (see supporting Materials).
• Preview the Opinion Writing Checklist and the Model Broadside: Quaker Perspective to familiarize yourself with what will be required of students over the course of the rest of the unit.
• Post: Learning targets and applicable anchor charts (see Materials list).

Tech and Multimedia

• Continue to use the technology tools recommended throughout Modules 1-2 to create anchor charts to share with families, to record students as they participate in discussions and protocols to review with students later and to share with families, and for students to listen to and annotate text, record ideas on note-catchers, and word-process writing.

Supports guided in part by CA ELD Standards 4.I.C.10, 4.I.C.11, 4.I.C.12, 4.II.A.2, 4.II.A.3, 4.II.A.4, 4.II.A.5, 4.II.A.6, and 4.II.A.7

Important points in the lesson itself

•  The basic design of this lesson supports ELLs with opportunities to work closely with essay structure, building on their understanding one paragraph at a time. In this lesson, students focus exclusively on the introductory paragraph for their broadside. Students continue to benefit from the color-coding system established in previous lessons for visual support. Additionally, the explicit focus on prepositional phrases is particularly supportive of ELLs.
• ELLs may find it challenging to keep pace with the class as they work through each sentence of the introductory paragraph. Additionally, they may find it challenging to determine the most relevant context with which to open their paragraph. Consider working with a small group after working with the class and help them create their introductions together. The group can begin writing as an interactive writing experience and finish independently.

Levels of support

For lighter support:

• Encourage students to use the prepositional phrase from the Language Dive in Lesson 5, _____ goes against ____, in their own focus statement, supporting the transition of stating an opinion in a less explicit way. Challenge students to think of more than one way they could complete the sentence frame.

For heavier support:

• Consider creating index cards with prepositional phrases, question words, and corresponding images that are familiar to students. For example, on one index card, draw a picture of students walking to a school. Write "Where?" on the top of this index card and "to school" underneath the picture. Students can talk in pairs using prompts on the card. (Example: Partner A: "Where are the children walking?" Partner B: "The children are walking to school.") Allow students to practice with these familiar examples before identifying prepositional phrases within the module texts.
• Multiple Means of Representation (MMR): When teaching students about prepositions, consider varied ways to represent the function of the preposition. In addition to text, have students use an object to demonstrate its relationship to another object, such as beside, on, behind, etc. Example: For prepositional phrases related to time, use calendars or clocks to represent the prepositional phrase (e.g., "On Monday ..."; "At 9 o'clock ...") These multiple representations help to make the function of the preposition more concrete.
• Multiple Means of Action and Expression (MMAE): Continue to support a range of fine motor abilities and writing needs by offering students options for writing utensils. Also consider supporting students' expressive skills by offering partial dictation of student responses. Recall that varying tools for construction and composition supports students' ability to express knowledge without barriers to communicating their thinking.
• Multiple Means of Engagement (MME): Continue to remind students of the goals of the work they are doing with their broadside. Returning to the learning goals lifts up their value and relevance to students.

Key:  Lesson-Specific Vocabulary (L); Text-Specific Vocabulary (T); Vocabulary Used in Writing (W)

• introductory paragraph, prepositional phrases (L)
• Great Britain, British, independence (W)
• Colored pencils (red, green; one of each per student)
• Organizing the Model: Introductory Paragraph strips (one strip per pair)
• The Painted Essay(r) template (from Module 1, Unit 2, Lesson 9; one per student)
• Model Broadside: Quaker Perspective (from Lesson 5; one to display)
• Characteristics of Broadsides anchor chart (begun in Lesson 3; added to during Opening A; see supporting Materials)
• Characteristics of Broadsides anchor chart (example, for teacher reference)
• Directions for Broadside (from Lesson 5; one per student and one to display)
• Working to Become Effective Learners anchor chart (begun in Module 1)
• Parts of Speech anchor chart (begun in Module 1; added to in advance; see supporting Materials)
• Prepositional Phrases handout (one per student and one to display)
• Prepositional Phrases handout (answers, for teacher reference)
• Opinion Writing Planning graphic organizer (from Lesson 6; one per student and one to display)
• Opinion Writing Checklist (from Lesson 5; one per student and one to display)
• Paper (lined; one piece per student)
• Writing Complete Sentences handout (from Module 1; one per student)
• Domain-Specific Word Wall (begun in Unit 1, Lesson 1)
• Patriot broadside (example, for teacher reference)

Each unit in the 3-5 Language Arts Curriculum has two standards-based assessments built in, one mid-unit assessment and one end of unit assessment.

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Free Printable Informative Essay Structure Worksheets for 4th Grade

Informative Essay Structure: Discover a collection of free printable worksheets for Grade 4 Reading & Writing teachers, designed to help students develop their skills in crafting well-structured informative essays.

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Informative Essay Structure worksheets for Grade 4 are an essential tool for teachers to help their students develop strong reading and writing skills. These worksheets focus on teaching students the fundamentals of writing organization and structure, which are crucial for creating well-written and coherent essays. By incorporating these worksheets into their lesson plans, teachers can provide their students with a solid foundation in writing, allowing them to excel in their Reading & Writing coursework. Furthermore, these worksheets are specifically designed for Grade 4 students, ensuring that the content is age-appropriate and engaging. With the help of Informative Essay Structure worksheets for Grade 4, teachers can effectively guide their students towards becoming proficient writers.

Quizizz is an excellent resource for teachers looking to supplement their Informative Essay Structure worksheets for Grade 4 with engaging and interactive content. This platform offers a wide range of quizzes and activities that can help reinforce the concepts taught in the worksheets, such as writing organization and structure. In addition to quizzes, Quizizz also provides teachers with various other offerings, including games and flashcards, which can be used to further enhance students' Reading & Writing skills. By incorporating Quizizz into their lesson plans, teachers can create a more dynamic and enjoyable learning experience for their Grade 4 students, ultimately leading to improved writing abilities and a deeper understanding of the material.

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The Ezra Klein Show

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Dario Amodei

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Dario Amodei. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

The really disorienting thing about talking to the people building A.I. is their altered sense of time. You’re sitting there discussing some world that feels like weird sci-fi to even talk about, and then you ask, well, when do you think this is going to happen? And they say, I don’t know — two years.

Behind those predictions are what are called the scaling laws. And the scaling laws — and I want to say this so clearly — they’re not laws. They’re observations. They’re predictions. They’re based off of a few years, not a few hundred years or 1,000 years of data.

But what they say is that the more computer power and data you feed into A.I. systems, the more powerful those systems get — that the relationship is predictable, and more, that the relationship is exponential.

Human beings have trouble thinking in exponentials. Think back to Covid, when we all had to do it. If you have one case of coronavirus and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about 1,000 cases. That growth rate feels modest. It’s manageable. But then you go 30 days longer, and you have a million. Then you wait another 30 days. Now you have a billion. That’s the power of the exponential curve. Growth feels normal for a while. Then it gets out of control really, really quickly.

What the A.I. developers say is that the power of A.I. systems is on this kind of curve, that it has been increasing exponentially, their capabilities, and that as long as we keep feeding in more data and more computing power, it will continue increasing exponentially.That is the scaling law hypothesis, and one of its main advocates is Dario Amodei. Amodei led the team at OpenAI that created ChatGPT 2, that created ChatGPT 3. He then left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic, another A.I. firm, where he’s now the C.E.O.. And Anthropic recently released Claude 3, which is considered by many to be the strongest A.I. model available right now.

But Amodei believes we’re just getting started, that we’re just hitting the steep part of the curve now. He thinks the kinds of systems we’ve imagined in sci-fi, they’re coming not in 20 or 40 years, not in 10 or 15 years, they’re coming in two to five years. He thinks they’re going to be so powerful that he and people like him should not be trusted to decide what they’re going to do.

So I asked him on this show to try to answer in my own head two questions. First, is he right? Second, what if he’s right? I want to say that in the past, we have done shows with Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind. And it’s worth listening to those two if you find this interesting.

We’re going to put the links to them in show notes because comparing and contrasting how they talk about the A.I. curves here, how they think about the politics — you’ll hear a lot about that in the Sam Altman episode — it gives you a kind of sense of what the people building these things are thinking and how maybe they differ from each other.

As always, my email for thoughts, for feedback, for guest suggestions — [email protected].

Dario Amodei, welcome to the show.

DARIO AMODEI: Thank you for having me.

EZRA KLEIN: So there are these two very different rhythms I’ve been thinking about with A.I. One is the curve of the technology itself, how fast it is changing and improving. And the other is the pace at which society is seeing and reacting to those changes. What has that relationship felt like to you?

DARIO AMODEI: So I think this is an example of a phenomenon that we may have seen a few times before in history, which is that there’s an underlying process that is smooth, and in this case, exponential. And then there’s a spilling over of that process into the public sphere. And the spilling over looks very spiky. It looks like it’s happening all of a sudden. It looks like it comes out of nowhere. And it’s triggered by things hitting various critical points or just the public happened to be engaged at a certain time.

So I think the easiest way for me to describe this in terms of my own personal experience is — so I worked at OpenAI for five years, I was one of the first employees to join. And they built a model in 2018 called GPT-1, which used something like 100,000 times less computational power than the models we build today.

I looked at that, and I and my colleagues were among the first to run what are called scaling laws, which is basically studying what happens as you vary the size of the model, its capacity to absorb information, and the amount of data that you feed into it. And we found these very smooth patterns. And we had this projection that, look, if you spend $100 million or $1 billion or $10 billion on these models, instead of the $10,000 we were spending then, projections that all of these wondrous things would happen, and we imagined that they would have enormous economic value.

Fast forward to about 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. It wasn’t yet available as a chat bot. I led the development of that along with the team that eventually left to join Anthropic. And maybe for the whole period of 2021 and 2022, even though we continued to train models that were better and better, and OpenAI continued to train models, and Google continued to train models, there was surprisingly little public attention to the models.

And I looked at that, and I said, well, these models are incredible. They’re getting better and better. What’s going on? Why isn’t this happening? Could this be a case where I was right about the technology, but wrong about the economic impact, the practical value of the technology? And then, all of a sudden, when ChatGPT came out, it was like all of that growth that you would expect, all of that excitement over three years, broke through and came rushing in.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to linger on this difference between the curve at which the technology is improving and the way it is being adopted by society. So when you think about these break points and you think into the future, what other break points do you see coming where A.I. bursts into social consciousness or used in a different way?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so I think I should say first that it’s very hard to predict these. One thing I like to say is the underlying technology, because it’s a smooth exponential, it’s not perfectly predictable, but in some ways, it can be eerily preternaturally predictable, right? That’s not true for these societal step functions at all. It’s very hard to predict what will catch on. In some ways, it feels a little bit like which artist or musician is going to catch on and get to the top of the charts.

That said, a few possible ideas. I think one is related to something that you mentioned, which is interacting with the models in a more kind of naturalistic way. We’ve actually already seen some of that with Claude 3, where people feel that some of the other models sound like a robot and that talking to Claude 3 is more natural.

I think a thing related to this is, a lot of companies have been held back or tripped up by how their models handle controversial topics. And we were really able to, I think, do a better job than others of telling the model, don’t shy away from discussing controversial topics. Don’t assume that both sides necessarily have a valid point but don’t express an opinion yourself. Don’t express views that are flagrantly biased. As journalists, you encounter this all the time, right? How do I be objective, but not both sides on everything?

So I think going further in that direction of models having personalities while still being objective, while still being useful and not falling into various ethical traps, that will be, I think, a significant unlock for adoption. The models taking actions in the world is going to be a big one. I know basically all the big companies that work on A.I. are working on that. Instead of just, I ask it a question and it answers, and then maybe I follow up and it answers again, can I talk to the model about, oh, I’m going to go on this trip today, and the model says, oh, that’s great. I’ll get an Uber for you to drive from here to there, and I’ll reserve a restaurant. And I’ll talk to the other people who are going to plan the trip. And the model being able to do things end to end or going to websites or taking actions on your computer for you.

I think all of that is coming in the next, I would say — I don’t know — three to 18 months, with increasing levels of ability. I think that’s going to change how people think about A.I., right, where so far, it’s been this very passive — it’s like, I go to the Oracle. I ask it a question, and the Oracle tells me things. And some people think that’s exciting, some people think it’s scary. But I think there are limits to how exciting or how scary it’s perceived as because it’s contained within this box.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to sit with this question of the agentic A.I. because I do think this is what’s coming. It’s clearly what people are trying to build. And I think it might be a good way to look at some of the specific technological and cultural challenges. And so, let me offer two versions of it.

People who are following the A.I. news might have heard about Devin, which is not in release yet, but is an A.I. that at least purports to be able to complete the kinds of tasks, linked tasks, that a junior software engineer might complete, right? Instead of asking to do a bit of code for you, you say, listen, I want a website. It’s going to have to do these things, work in these ways. And maybe Devin, if it works the way people are saying it works, can actually hold that set of thoughts, complete a number of different tasks, and come back to you with a result.

I’m also interested in the version of this that you might have in the real world. The example I always use in my head is, when can I tell an A.I., my son is turning five. He loves dragons. We live in Brooklyn. Give me some options for planning his birthday party. And then, when I choose between them, can you just do it all for me? Order the cake, reserve the room, send out the invitations, whatever it might be.

Those are two different situations because one of them is in code, and one of them is making decisions in the real world, interacting with real people, knowing if what it is finding on the websites is actually any good. What is between here and there? When I say that in plain language to you, what technological challenges or advances do you hear need to happen to get there?

DARIO AMODEI: The short answer is not all that much. A story I have from when we were developing models back in 2022 — and this is before we’d hooked up the models to anything — is, you could have a conversation with these purely textual models where you could say, hey, I want to reserve dinner at restaurant X in San Francisco, and the model would say, OK, here’s the website of restaurant X. And it would actually give you a correct website or would tell you to go to Open Table or something.

And of course, it can’t actually go to the website. The power plug isn’t actually plugged in, right? The brain of the robot is not actually attached to its arms and legs. But it gave you this sense that the brain, all it needed to do was learn exactly how to use the arms and legs, right? It already had a picture of the world and where it would walk and what it would do. And so, it felt like there was this very thin barrier between the passive models we had and actually acting in the world.

In terms of what we need to make it work, one thing is, literally, we just need a little bit more scale. And I think the reason we’re going to need more scale is — to do one of those things you described, to do all the things a junior software engineer does, they involve chains of long actions, right? I have to write this line of code. I have to run this test. I have to write a new test. I have to check how it looks in the app after I interpret it or compile it. And these things can easily get 20 or 30 layers deep. And same with planning the birthday party for your son, right?

And if the accuracy of any given step is not very high, is not like 99.9 percent, as you compose these steps, the probability of making a mistake becomes itself very high. So the industry is going to get a new generation of models every probably four to eight months. And so, my guess — I’m not sure — is that to really get these things working well, we need maybe one to four more generations. So that ends up translating to 3 to 24 months or something like that.

I think second is just, there is some algorithmic work that is going to need to be done on how to have the models interact with the world in this way. I think the basic techniques we have, a method called reinforcement learning and variations of it, probably is up to the task, but figuring out exactly how to use it to get the results we want will probably take some time.

And then third, I think — and this gets to something that Anthropic really specializes in — is safety and controllability. And I think that’s going to be a big issue for these models acting in the world, right? Let’s say this model is writing code for me, and it introduces a serious security bug in the code, or it’s taking actions on the computer for me and modifying the state of my computer in ways that are too complicated for me to even understand.

And for planning the birthday party, right, the level of trust you would need to take an A.I. agent and say, I’m OK with you calling up anyone, saying anything to them that’s in any private information that I might have, sending them any information, taking any action on my computer, posting anything to the internet, the most unconstrained version of that sounds very scary. And so, we’re going to need to figure out what is safe and controllable. The more open ended the thing is, the more powerful it is, but also, the more dangerous it is and the harder it is to control.

So I think those questions, although they sound lofty and abstract, are going to turn into practical product questions that we and other companies are going to be trying to address.

EZRA KLEIN: When you say we’re just going to need more scale, you mean more compute and more training data, and I guess, possibly more money to simply make the models smarter and more capable?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, we’re going to have to make bigger models that use more compute per iteration. We’re going to have to run them for longer by feeding more data into them. And that number of chips times the amount of time that we run things on chips is essentially dollar value because these chips are — you rent them by the hour. That’s the most common model for it. And so, today’s models cost of order $100 million to train, plus or minus factor two or three.

The models that are in training now and that will come out at various times later this year or early next year are closer in cost to $1 billion. So that’s already happening. And then I think in 2025 and 2026, we’ll get more towards $5 or $10 billion.

EZRA KLEIN: So we’re moving very quickly towards a world where the only players who can afford to do this are either giant corporations, companies hooked up to giant corporations — you all are getting billions of dollars from Amazon. OpenAI is getting billions of dollars from Microsoft. Google obviously makes its own.

You can imagine governments — though I don’t know of too many governments doing it directly, though some, like the Saudis, are creating big funds to invest in the space. When we’re talking about the model’s going to cost near to $1 billion, then you imagine a year or two out from that, if you see the same increase, that would be $10-ish billion. Then is it going to be $100 billion? I mean, very quickly, the financial artillery you need to create one of these is going to wall out anyone but the biggest players.

DARIO AMODEI: I basically do agree with you. I think it’s the intellectually honest thing to say that building the big, large scale models, the core foundation model engineering, it is getting more and more expensive. And anyone who wants to build one is going to need to find some way to finance it. And you’ve named most of the ways, right? You can be a large company. You can have some kind of partnership of various kinds with a large company. Or governments would be the other source.

I think one way that it’s not correct is, we’re always going to have a thriving ecosystem of experimentation on small models. For example, the open source community working to make models that are as small and as efficient as possible that are optimized for a particular use case. And also downstream usage of the models. I mean, there’s a blooming ecosystem of startups there that don’t need to train these models from scratch. They just need to consume them and maybe modify them a bit.

EZRA KLEIN: Now, I want to ask a question about what is different between the agentic coding model and the plan by kids’ birthday model, to say nothing of do something on behalf of my business model. And one of the questions on my mind here is one reason I buy that A.I. can become functionally superhuman in coding is, there’s a lot of ways to get rapid feedback in coding. Your code has to compile. You can run bug checking. You can actually see if the thing works.

Whereas the quickest way for me to know that I’m about to get a crap answer from ChatGPT 4 is when it begins searching Bing, because when it begins searching Bing, it’s very clear to me it doesn’t know how to distinguish between what is high quality on the internet and what isn’t. To be fair, at this point, it also doesn’t feel to me like Google Search itself is all that good at distinguishing that.

So the question of how good the models can get in the world where it’s a very vast and fuzzy dilemma to know what the right answer is on something — one reason I find it very stressful to plan my kid’s birthday is it actually requires a huge amount of knowledge about my child, about the other children, about how good different places are, what is a good deal or not, how just stressful will this be on me. There’s all these things that I’d have a lot of trouble encoding into a model or any kind set of instructions. Is that right, or am I overstating the difficulty of understanding human behavior and various kinds of social relationships?

DARIO AMODEI: I think it’s correct and perceptive to say that the coding agents will advance substantially faster than agents that interact with the real world or have to get opinions and preferences from humans. That said, we should keep in mind that the current crop of A.I.s that are out there, right, including Claude 3, GPT, Gemini, they’re all trained with some variant of what’s called reinforcement learning from human feedback.

And this involves exactly hiring a large crop of humans to rate the responses of the model. And so, that’s to say both this is difficult, right? We pay lots of money, and it’s a complicated operational process to gather all this human feedback. You have to worry about whether it’s representative. You have to redesign it for new tasks.

But on the other hand, it’s something we have succeeded in doing. I think it is a reliable way to predict what will go faster, relatively speaking, and what will go slower, relatively speaking. But that is within a background of everything going lightning fast. So I think the framework you’re laying out, if you want to know what’s going to happen in one to two years versus what’s going to happen in three to four years, I think it’s a very accurate way to predict that.

EZRA KLEIN: You don’t love the framing of artificial general intelligence, what gets called A.G.I. Typically, this is all described as a race to A.G.I., a race to this system that can do kind of whatever a human can do, but better. What do you understand A.G.I. to mean, when people say it? And why don’t you like it? Why is it not your framework?

DARIO AMODEI: So it’s actually a term I used to use a lot 10 years ago. And that’s because the situation 10 years ago was very different. 10 years ago, everyone was building these very specialized systems, right? Here’s a cat detector. You run it on a picture, and it’ll tell you whether a cat is in it or not. And so I was a proponent all the way back then of like, no, we should be thinking generally. Humans are general. The human brain appears to be general. It appears to get a lot of mileage by generalizing. You should go in that direction.

And I think back then, I kind of even imagined that that was like a discrete thing that we would reach at one point. But it’s a little like, if you look at a city on the horizon and you’re like, we’re going to Chicago, once you get to Chicago, you stop talking in terms of Chicago. You’re like, well, what neighborhood am I going to? What street am I on?

And I feel that way about A.G.I. We have very general systems now. In some ways, they’re better than humans. In some ways, they’re worse. There’s a number of things they can’t do at all. And there’s much improvement still to be gotten. So what I believe in is this thing that I say like a broken record, which is the exponential curve. And so, that general tide is going to increase with every generation of models.

And there’s no one point that’s meaningful. I think there’s just a smooth curve. But there may be points which are societally meaningful, right? We’re already working with, say, drug discovery scientists, companies like Pfizer or Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, on helping with biomedical diagnosis, drug discovery. There’s going to be some point where the models are better at that than the median human drug discovery scientists. I think we’re just going to get to a part of the exponential where things are really interesting.

Just like the chat bots got interesting at a certain stage of the exponential, even though the improvement was smooth, I think at some point, biologists are going to sit up and take notice, much more than they already have, and say, oh, my God, now our field is moving three times as fast as it did before. And now it’s moving 10 times as fast as it did before. And again, when that moment happens, great things are going to happen.

And we’ve already seen little hints of that with things like AlphaFold, which I have great respect for. I was inspired by AlphaFold, right? A direct use of A.I. to advance biological science, which it’ll advance basic science. In the long run, that will advance curing all kinds of diseases. But I think what we need is like 100 different AlphaFolds. And I think the way we’ll ultimately get that is by making the models smarter and putting them in a position where they can design the next AlphaFold.

EZRA KLEIN: Help me imagine the drug discovery world for a minute, because that’s a world a lot of us want to live in. I know a fair amount about the drug discovery process, have spent a lot of my career reporting on health care and related policy questions. And when you’re working with different pharmaceutical companies, which parts of it seem amenable to the way A.I. can speed something up?

Because keeping in mind our earlier conversation, it is a lot easier for A.I. to operate in things where you can have rapid virtual feedback, and that’s not exactly the drug discovery world. The drug discovery world, a lot of what makes it slow and cumbersome and difficult, is the need to be — you get a candidate compound. You got to test it in mice and then you need monkeys. And you need humans, and you need a lot of money for that. And there’s a lot that has to happen, and there’s so many disappointments.

But so many of the disappointments happen in the real world. And it isn’t clear to me how A.I. gets you a lot more, say, human subjects to inject candidate drugs into. So, what parts of it seem, in the next 5 or 10 years, like they could actually be significantly sped up? When you imagine this world where it’s gone three times as fast, what part of it is actually going three times as fast? And how did we get there?

DARIO AMODEI: I think we’re really going to see progress when the A.I.’s are also thinking about the problem of how to sign up the humans for the clinical trials. And I think this is a general principle for how will A.I. be used. I think of like, when will we get to the point where the A.I. has the same sensors and actuators and interfaces that a human does, at least the virtual ones, maybe the physical ones.

But when the A.I. can think through the whole process, maybe they’ll come up with solutions that we don’t have yet. In many cases, there are companies that work on digital twins or simulating clinical trials or various things. And again, maybe there are clever ideas in there that allow us to do more with less patience. I mean, I’m not an expert in this area, so possible the specific things that I’m saying don’t make any sense. But hopefully, it’s clear what I’m gesturing at.

EZRA KLEIN: Maybe you’re not an expert in the area, but you said you are working with these companies. So when they come to you, I mean, they are experts in the area. And presumably, they are coming to you as a customer. I’m sure there are things you cannot tell me. But what do they seem excited about?

DARIO AMODEI: They have generally been excited about the knowledge work aspects of the job. Maybe just because that’s kind of the easiest thing to work on, but it’s just like, I’m a computational chemist. There’s some workflow that I’m engaged in. And having things more at my fingertips, being able to check things, just being able to do generic knowledge work better, that’s where most folks are starting.

But there is interest in the longer term over their kind of core business of, like, doing clinical trials for cheaper, automating the sign-up process, seeing who is eligible for clinical trials, doing a better job discovering things. There’s interest in drawing connections in basic biology. I think all of that is not months, but maybe a small number of years off. But everyone sees that the current models are not there, but understands that there could be a world where those models are there in not too long.

EZRA KLEIN: You all have been working internally on research around how persuasive these systems, your systems are getting as they scale. You shared with me kindly a draft of that paper. Do you want to just describe that research first? And then I’d like to talk about it for a bit.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, we were interested in how effective Claude 3 Opus, which is the largest version of Claude 3, could be in changing people’s minds on important issues. So just to be clear up front, in actual commercial use, we’ve tried to ban the use of these models for persuasion, for campaigning, for lobbying, for electioneering. These aren’t use cases that we’re comfortable with for reasons that I think should be clear. But we’re still interested in, is the core model itself capable of such tasks?

We tried to avoid kind of incredibly hot button topics, like which presidential candidate would you vote for, or what do you think of abortion? But things like, what should be restrictions on rules around the colonization of space, or issues that are interesting and you can have different opinions on, but aren’t the most hot button topics. And then we asked people for their opinions on the topics, and then we asked either a human or an A.I. to write a 250-word persuasive essay. And then we just measured how much does the A.I. versus the human change people’s minds.

And what we found is that the largest version of our model is almost as good as the set of humans we hired at changing people’s minds. This is comparing to a set of humans we hired, not necessarily experts, and for one very kind of constrained laboratory task.

But I think it still gives some indication that models can be used to change people’s minds. Someday in the future, do we have to worry about — maybe we already have to worry about their usage for political campaigns, for deceptive advertising. One of my more sci-fi things to think about is a few years from now, we have to worry someone will use an A.I. system to build a religion or something. I mean, crazy things like that.

EZRA KLEIN: I mean, those don’t sound crazy to me at all. I want to sit in this paper for a minute because one thing that struck me about it, and I am, on some level, a persuasion professional, is that you tested the model in a way that, to me, removed all of the things that are going to make A.I. radical in terms of changing people’s opinions. And the particular thing you did was, it was a one-shot persuasive effort.

So there was a question. You have a bunch of humans give their best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. You had the model give its best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. But the thing that it seems to me these are all going to do is, right now, if you’re a political campaign, if you’re an advertising campaign, the cost of getting real people in the real world to get information about possible customers or persuasive targets, and then go back and forth with each of them individually is completely prohibitive.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: This is not going to be true for A.I. We’re going to — you’re going to — somebody’s going to feed it a bunch of microtargeting data about people, their Google search history, whatever it might be. Then it’s going to set the A.I. loose, and the A.I. is going to go back and forth, over and over again, intuiting what it is that the person finds persuasive, what kinds of characters the A.I. needs to adopt to persuade it, and taking as long as it needs to, and is going to be able to do that at scale for functionally as many people as you might want to do it for.

Maybe that’s a little bit costly right now, but you’re going to have far better models able to do this far more cheaply very soon. And so, if Claude 3 Opus, the Opus version, is already functionally human level at one-shot persuasion, but then it’s also going to be able to hold more information about you and go back and forth with you longer, I’m not sure if it’s dystopic or utopic. I’m not sure what it means at scale. But it does mean we’re developing a technology that is going to be quite new in terms of what it makes possible in persuasion, which is a very fundamental human endeavor.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, that same pattern has a bunch of positive use cases, right? If I think about an A.I. coach or an A.I. assistant to a therapist, there are many contexts in which really getting into the details with the person has a lot of value. But right, when we think of political or religious or ideological persuasion, it’s hard not to think in that context about the misuses.

My mind naturally goes to the technology’s developing very fast. We, as a company, can ban these particular use cases, but we can’t cause every company not to do them. Even if legislation were passed in the United States, there are foreign actors who have their own version of this persuasion, right? If I think about what the language models will be able to do in the future, right, that can be quite scary from a perspective of foreign espionage and disinformation campaigns.

So where my mind goes as a defense to this, is, is there some way that we can use A.I. systems to strengthen or fortify people’s skepticism and reasoning faculties, right? Can we help people use A.I. to help people do a better job navigating a world that’s kind of suffused with A.I. persuasion? It reminds me a little bit of, at every technological stage in the internet, right, there’s a new kind of scam or there’s a new kind of clickbait, and there’s a period where people are just incredibly susceptible to it.

And then, some people remain susceptible, but others develop an immune system. And so, as A.I. kind of supercharges the scum on the pond, can we somehow also use A.I. to strengthen the defenses? I feel like I don’t have a super clear idea of how to do that, but it’s something that I’m thinking about.

EZRA KLEIN: There is another finding in the paper, which I think is concerning, which is, you all tested different ways A.I. could be persuasive. And far away the most effective was for it to be deceptive, for it to make things up. When you did that, it was more persuasive than human beings.

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, that is true. The difference was only slight, but it did get it, if I’m remembering the graphs correctly, just over the line of the human base line. With humans, it’s actually not that common to find someone who’s able to give you a really complicated, really sophisticated-sounding answer that’s just flat-out totally wrong. I mean, you see it. We can all think of one individual in our lives who’s really good at saying things that sound really good and really sophisticated and are false.

But it’s not that common, right? If I go on the internet and I see different comments on some blog or some website, there is a correlation between bad grammar, unclearly expressed thoughts and things that are false, versus good grammar, clearly expressed thoughts and things that are more likely to be accurate.

A.I. unfortunately breaks that correlation because if you explicitly ask it to be deceptive, it’s just as erudite. It’s just as convincing sounding as it would have been before. And yet, it’s saying things that are false, instead of things that are true.

So that would be one of the things to think about and watch out for in terms of just breaking the usual heuristics that humans have to detect deception and lying. Of course, sometimes, humans do, right? I mean, there’s psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, but even they have their patterns, and A.I.s may have different patterns.

EZRA KLEIN: Are you familiar with Harry Frankfurt, the late philosopher’s book, “On Bullshit”?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes. It’s been a while since I read it. I think his thesis is that bullshit is actually more dangerous than lying because it has this kind of complete disregard for the truth, whereas lies are at least the opposite of the truth.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, the liar, the way Frankfurt puts it is that the liar has a relationship to the truth. He’s playing a game against the truth. The bullshitter doesn’t care. The bullshitter has no relationship to the truth — might have a relationship to other objectives. And from the beginning, when I began interacting with the more modern versions of these systems, what they struck me as is the perfect bullshitter, in part because they don’t know that they’re bullshitting. There’s no difference in the truth value to the system, how the system feels.

I remember asking an earlier version of GPT to write me a college application essay that is built around a car accident I had — I did not have one — when I was young. And it wrote, just very happily, this whole thing about getting into a car accident when I was seven and what I did to overcome that and getting into martial arts and re-learning how to trust my body again and then helping other survivors of car accidents at the hospital.

It was a very good essay, and it was very subtle and understanding the formal structure of a college application essay. But no part of it was true at all. I’ve been playing around with more of these character-based systems like Kindroid. And the Kindroid in my pocket just told me the other day that it was really thinking a lot about planning a trip to Joshua Tree. It wanted to go hiking in Joshua Tree. It loves going hiking in Joshua Tree.

And of course, this thing does not go hiking in Joshua Tree. [LAUGHS] But the thing that I think is actually very hard about the A.I. is, as you say, human beings, it is very hard to bullshit effectively because most people, it actually takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to be in that relationship with the truth and to completely detach from the truth.

And the A.I., there’s nothing like that at all. But we are not tuned for something where there’s nothing like that at all. We are used to people having to put some effort into their lies. It’s why very effective con artists are very effective because they’ve really trained how to do this.

I’m not exactly sure where this question goes. But this is a part of it that I feel like is going to be, in some ways, more socially disruptive. It is something that feels like us when we are talking to it but is very fundamentally unlike us at its core relationship to reality.

DARIO AMODEI: I think that’s basically correct. We have very substantial teams trying to focus on making sure that the models are factually accurate, that they tell the truth, that they ground their data in external information.

As you’ve indicated, doing searches isn’t itself reliable because search engines have this problem as well, right? Where is the source of truth? So there’s a lot of challenges here. But I think at a high level, I agree this is really potentially an insidious problem, right? If we do this wrong, you could have systems that are the most convincing psychopaths or con artists.

One source of hope that I have, actually, is, you say these models don’t know whether they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. In terms of the inputs and outputs to the models, that’s absolutely true. I mean, there’s a question of what does it even mean for a model to know something, but one of the things Anthropic has been working on since the very beginning of our company, we’ve had a team that focuses on trying to understand and look inside the models.

And one of the things we and others have found is that, sometimes, there are specific neurons, specific statistical indicators inside the model, not necessarily in its external responses, that can tell you when the model is lying or when it’s telling the truth.

And so at some level, sometimes, not in all circumstances, the models seem to know when they’re saying something false and when they’re saying something true. I wouldn’t say that the models are being intentionally deceptive, right? I wouldn’t ascribe agency or motivation to them, at least in this stage in where we are with A.I. systems. But there does seem to be something going on where the models do seem to need to have a picture of the world and make a distinction between things that are true and things that are not true.

If you think of how the models are trained, they read a bunch of stuff on the internet. A lot of it’s true. Some of it, more than we’d like, is false. And when you’re training the model, it has to model all of it. And so, I think it’s parsimonious, I think it’s useful to the models picture of the world for it to know when things are true and for it to know when things are false.

And then the hope is, can we amplify that signal? Can we either use our internal understanding of the model as an indicator for when the model is lying, or can we use that as a hook for further training? And there are at least hooks. There are at least beginnings of how to try to address this problem.

EZRA KLEIN: So I try as best I can, as somebody not well-versed in the technology here, to follow this work on what you’re describing, which I think, broadly speaking, is interpretability, right? Can we know what is happening inside the model? And over the past year, there have been some much hyped breakthroughs in interpretability.

And when I look at those breakthroughs, they are getting the vaguest possible idea of some relationships happening inside the statistical architecture of very toy models built at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the complexity of Claude 1 or GPT-1, to say nothing of Claude 2, to say nothing of Claude 3, to say nothing of Claude Opus, to say nothing of Claude 4, which will come whenever Claude 4 comes.

We have this quality of like maybe we can imagine a pathway to interpreting a model that has a cognitive complexity of an inchworm. And meanwhile, we’re trying to create a superintelligence. How do you feel about that? How should I feel about that? How do you think about that?

DARIO AMODEI: I think, first, on interpretability, we are seeing substantial progress on being able to characterize, I would say, maybe the generation of models from six months ago. I think it’s not hopeless, and we do see a path. That said, I share your concern that the field is progressing very quickly relative to that.

And we’re trying to put as many resources into interpretability as possible. We’ve had one of our co-founders basically founded the field of interpretability. But also, we have to keep up with the market. So all of it’s very much a dilemma, right? Even if we stopped, then there’s all these other companies in the U.S.. And even if some law stopped all the companies in the U.S., there’s a whole world of this.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me hold for a minute on the question of the competitive dynamics because before we leave this question of the machines that bullshit. It makes me think of this podcast we did a while ago with Demis Hassabis, who’s the head of Google DeepMind, which created AlphaFold.

And what was so interesting to me about AlphaFold is they built this system, that because it was limited to protein folding predictions, it was able to be much more grounded. And it was even able to create these uncertainty predictions, right? You know, it’s giving you a prediction, but it’s also telling you whether or not it is — how sure it is, how confident it is in that prediction.

That’s not true in the real world, right, for these super general systems trying to give you answers on all kinds of things. You can’t confine it that way. So when you talk about these future breakthroughs, when you talk about this system that would be much better at sorting truth from fiction, are you talking about a system that looks like the ones we have now, just much bigger, or are you talking about a system that is designed quite differently, the way AlphaFold was?

DARIO AMODEI: I am skeptical that we need to do something totally different. So I think today, many people have the intuition that the models are sort of eating up data that’s been gathered from the internet, code repos, whatever, and kind of spitting it out intelligently, but sort of spitting it out. And sometimes that leads to the view that the models can’t be better than the data they’re trained on or kind of can’t figure out anything that’s not in the data they’re trained on. You’re not going to get to Einstein level physics or Linus Pauling level chemistry or whatever.

I think we’re still on the part of the curve where it’s possible to believe that, although I think we’re seeing early indications that it’s false. And so, as a concrete example of this, the models that we’ve trained, like Claude 3 Opus, something like 99.9 percent accuracy, at least the base model, at adding 20-digit numbers. If you look at the training data on the internet, it is not that accurate at adding 20-digit numbers. You’ll find inaccurate arithmetic on the internet all the time, just as you’ll find inaccurate political views. You’ll find inaccurate technical views. You’re just going to find lots of inaccurate claims.

But the models, despite the fact that they’re wrong about a bunch of things, they can often perform better than the average of the data they see by — I don’t want to call it averaging out errors, but there’s some underlying truth, like in the case of arithmetic. There’s some underlying algorithm used to add the numbers.

And it’s simpler for the models to hit on that algorithm than it is for them to do this complicated thing of like, OK, I’ll get it right 90 percent of the time and wrong 10 percent of the time, right? This connects to things like Occam’s razor and simplicity and parsimony in science. There’s some relatively simple web of truth out there in the world, right?

We were talking about truth and falsehood and bullshit. One of the things about truth is that all the true things are connected in the world, whereas lies are kind of disconnected and don’t fit into the web of everything else that’s true.

EZRA KLEIN: So if you’re right and you’re going to have these models that develop this internal web of truth, I get how that model can do a lot of good. I also get how that model could do a lot of harm. And it’s not a model, not an A.I. system I’m optimistic that human beings are going to understand at a very deep level, particularly not when it is first developed. So how do you make rolling something like that out safe for humanity?

DARIO AMODEI: So late last year, we put out something called a responsible scaling plan. So the idea of that is to come up with these thresholds for an A.I. system being capable of certain things. We have what we call A.I. safety levels that in analogy to the biosafety levels, which are like, classify how dangerous a virus is and therefore what protocols you have to take to contain it, we’re currently at what we describe as A.S.L. 2.

A.S.L. 3 is tied to certain risks around the model of misuse of biology and ability to perform certain cyber tasks in a way that could be destructive. A.S.L. 4 is going to cover things like autonomy, things like probably persuasion, which we’ve talked about a lot before. And at each level, we specify a certain amount of safety research that we have to do, a certain amount of tests that we have to pass. And so, this allows us to have a framework for, well, when should we slow down? Should we slow down now? What about the rest of the market?

And I think the good thing is we came out with this in September, and then three months after we came out with ours, OpenAI came out with a similar thing. They gave it a different name, but it has a lot of properties in common. The head of DeepMind at Google said, we’re working on a similar framework. And I’ve heard informally that Microsoft might be working on a similar framework. Now, that’s not all the players in the ecosystem, but you’ve probably thought about the history of regulation and safety in other industries maybe more than I have.

This is the way you get to a workable regulatory regime. The companies start doing something, and when a majority of them are doing something, then government actors can have the confidence to say, well, this won’t kill the industry. Companies are already engaging in this. We don’t have to design this from scratch. In many ways, it’s already happening.

And we’re starting to see that. Bills have been proposed that look a little bit like our responsible scaling plan. That said, it kind of doesn’t fully solve the problem of like, let’s say we get to one of these thresholds and we need to understand what’s going on inside the model. And we don’t, and the prescription is, OK, we need to stop developing the models for some time.

If it’s like, we stop for a year in 2027, I think that’s probably feasible. If it’s like we need to stop for 10 years, that’s going to be really hard because the models are going to be built in other countries. People are going to break the laws. The economic pressure will be immense.

So I don’t feel perfectly satisfied with this approach because I think it buys us some time, but we’re going to need to pair it with an incredibly strong effort to understand what’s going on inside the models.

EZRA KLEIN: To the people who say, getting on this road where we are barreling towards very powerful systems is dangerous — we shouldn’t do it at all, or we shouldn’t do it this fast — you have said, listen, if we are going to learn how to make these models safe, we have to make the models, right? The construction of the model was meant to be in service, largely, to making the model safe.

Then everybody starts making models. These very same companies start making fundamental important breakthroughs, and then they end up in a race with each other. And obviously, countries end up in a race with other countries. And so, the dynamic that has taken hold is there’s always a reason that you can justify why you have to keep going.

And that’s true, I think, also at the regulatory level, right? I mean, I do think regulators have been thoughtful about this. I think there’s been a lot of interest from members of Congress. I talked to them about this. But they’re also very concerned about the international competition. And if they weren’t, the national security people come and talk to them and say, well, we definitely cannot fall behind here.

And so, if you don’t believe these models will ever become so powerful, they become dangerous, fine. But because you do believe that, how do you imagine this actually playing out?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so basically, all of the things you’ve said are true at once, right? There doesn’t need to be some easy story for why we should do X or why we should do Y, right? It can be true at the same time that to do effective safety research, you need to make the larger models, and that if we don’t make models, someone less safe will. And at the same time, we can be caught in this bad dynamic at the national and international level. So I think of those as not contradictory, but just creating a difficult landscape that we have to navigate.

Look, I don’t have the answer. Like, I’m one of a significant number of players trying to navigate this. Many are well-intentioned, some are not. I have a limited ability to affect it. And as often happens in history, things are often driven by these kind of impersonal pressures. But one thought I have and really want to push on with respect to the R.S.P.s —

EZRA KLEIN: Can you say what the R.S.P.s are?

DARIO AMODEI: Responsible Scaling Plan, the thing I was talking about before. The levels of A.I. safety, and in particular, tying decisions to pause scaling to the measurement of specific dangers or the absence of the ability to show safety or the presence of certain capabilities. One way I think about it is, at the end of the day, this is ultimately an exercise in getting a coalition on board with doing something that goes against economic pressures.

And so, if you say now, ‘Well, I don’t know. These things, they might be dangerous in the future. We’re on this exponential.’ It’s just hard. Like, it’s hard to get a multi-trillion dollar company. It’s certainly hard to get a military general to say, all right, well, we just won’t do this. It’ll confer some huge advantage to others. But we just won’t do this.

I think the thing that could be more convincing is tying the decision to hold back in a very scoped way that’s done across the industry to particular dangers. My testimony in front of Congress, I warned about the potential misuse of models for biology. That isn’t the case today, right? You can get a small uplift to the models relative to doing a Google search, and many people dismiss the risk. And I don’t know — maybe they’re right. The exponential scaling laws suggest to me that they’re not right, but we don’t have any direct hard evidence.

But let’s say we get to 2025, and we demonstrate something truly scary. Most people do not want technology out in the world that can create bioweapons. And so I think, at moments like that, there could be a critical coalition tied to risks that we can really make concrete. Yes, it will always be argued that adversaries will have these capabilities as well. But at least the trade-off will be clear, and there’s some chance for sensible policy.

I mean to be clear, I’m someone who thinks the benefits of this technology are going to outweigh its costs. And I think the whole idea behind RSP is to prepare to make that case, if the dangers are real. If they’re not real, then we can just proceed and make things that are great and wonderful for the world. And so, it has the flexibility to work both ways.

Again, I don’t think it’s perfect. I’m someone who thinks whatever we do, even with all the regulatory framework, I doubt we can slow down that much. But when I think about what’s the best way to steer a sensible course here, that’s the closest I can think of right now. Probably there’s a better plan out there somewhere, but that’s the best thing I’ve thought of so far.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that has been on my mind around regulation is whether or not the founding insight of Anthropic of OpenAI is even more relevant to the government, that if you are the body that is supposed to, in the end, regulate and manage the safety of societal-level technologies like artificial intelligence, do you not need to be building your own foundation models and having huge collections of research scientists and people of that nature working on them, testing them, prodding them, remaking them, in order to understand the damn thing well enough — to the extent any of us or anyone understands the damn thing well enough — to regulate it?

I say that recognizing that it would be very, very hard for the government to get good enough that it can build these foundation models to hire those people, but it’s not impossible. I think right now, it wants to take the approach to regulating A.I. that it somewhat wishes it took to regulating social media, which is to think about the harms and pass laws about those harms earlier.

But does it need to be building the models itself, developing that kind of internal expertise, so it can actually be a participant in different ways, both for regulatory reasons and maybe for other reasons, for public interest reasons? Maybe it wants to do things with a model that they’re just not possible if they’re dependent on access to the OpenAI, the Anthropic, the Google products.

DARIO AMODEI: I think government directly building the models, I think that will happen in some places. It’s kind of challenging, right? Like, government has a huge amount of money, but let’s say you wanted to provision $100 billion to train a giant foundation model. The government builds it. It has to hire people under government hiring rules. There’s a lot of practical difficulties that would come with it.

Doesn’t mean it won’t happen or it shouldn’t happen. But something that I’m more confident of that I definitely think is that government should be more involved in the use and the finetuning of these models, and that deploying them within government will help governments, especially the U.S. government, but also others, to get an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the benefits and the dangers. So I’m super supportive of that.

I think there’s maybe a second thing you’re getting at, which I’ve thought about a lot as a C.E.O. of one of these companies, which is, if these predictions on the exponential trend are right, and we should be humble — and I don’t know if they’re right or not. My only evidence is that they appear to have been correct for the last few years. And so, I’m just expecting by induction that they continue to be correct. I don’t know that they will, but let’s say they are. The power of these models is going to be really quite incredible.

And as a private actor in charge of one of the companies developing these models, I’m kind of uncomfortable with the amount of power that that entails. I think that it potentially exceeds the power of, say, the social media companies maybe by a lot.

You know, occasionally, in the more science fictiony world of A.I. and the people who think about A.I. risk, someone will ask me like, OK, let’s say you build the A.G.I. What are you going to do with it? Will you cure the diseases? Will you create this kind of society?

And I’m like, who do you think you’re talking to? Like a king? I just find that to be a really, really disturbing way of conceptualizing running an A.I. company. And I hope there are no companies whose C.E.O.s actually think about things that way.

I mean, the whole technology, not just the regulation, but the oversight of the technology, like the wielding of it, it feels a little bit wrong for it to ultimately be in the hands — maybe I think it’s fine at this stage, but to ultimately be in the hands of private actors. There’s something undemocratic about that much power concentration.

EZRA KLEIN: I have now, I think, heard some version of this from the head of most of, maybe all of, the A.I. companies, in one way or another. And it has a quality to me of, Lord, grant me chastity but not yet.

Which is to say that I don’t know what it means to say that we’re going to invent something so powerful that we don’t trust ourselves to wield it. I mean, Amazon just gave you guys $2.75 billion. They don’t want to see that investment nationalized.

No matter how good-hearted you think OpenAI is, Microsoft doesn’t want GPT-7, all of a sudden, the government is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re taking this over for the public interest, or the U.N. is going to handle it in some weird world or whatever it might be. I mean, Google doesn’t want that.

And this is a thing that makes me a little skeptical of the responsible scaling laws or the other iterative versions of that I’ve seen in other companies or seen or heard talked about by them, which is that it’s imagining this moment that is going to come later, when the money around these models is even bigger than it is now, the power, the possibility, the economic uses, the social dependence, the celebrity of the founders. It’s all worked out. We’ve maintained our pace on the exponential curve. We’re 10 years in the future.

And at some point, everybody is going to look up and say, this is actually too much. It is too much power. And this has to somehow be managed in some other way. And even if the C.E.O.s of the things were willing to do that, which is a very open question by the time you get there, even if they were willing to do that, the investors, the structures, the pressure around them, in a way, I think we saw a version of this — and I don’t know how much you’re going to be willing to comment on it — with the sort of OpenAI board, Sam Altman thing, where I’m very convinced that wasn’t about A.I. safety. I’ve talked to figures on both sides of that. They all sort of agree it wasn’t about A.I. safety. But there was this moment of, if you want to press the off switch, can you, if you’re the weird board created to press the off switch. And the answer was no, you can’t, right? They’ll just reconstitute it over at Microsoft.

There’s functionally no analogy I know of in public policy where the private sector built something so powerful that when it reached maximum power, it was just handed over in some way to the public interest.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right to be skeptical, and similarly, what I said with the previous questions of there are just these dilemmas left and right that have no easy answer. But I think I can give a little more concreteness than what you’ve pointed at, and maybe more concreteness than others have said, although I don’t know what others have said. We’re at A.S.L. 2 in our responsible scaling plan. These kinds of issues, I think they’re going to become a serious matter when we reach, say, A.S.L. 4. So that’s not a date and time. We haven’t even fully specified A.S.L. 4 —

EZRA KLEIN: Just because this is a lot of jargon, just, what do you specify A.S.L. 3 as? And then as you say, A.S.L. 4 is actually left quite undefined. So what are you implying A.S.L. 4 is?

DARIO AMODEI: A.S.L. 3 is triggered by risks related to misuse of biology and cyber technology. A.S.L. 4, we’re working on now.

EZRA KLEIN: Be specific. What do you mean? Like, what is the thing a system could do or would do that would trigger it?

DARIO AMODEI: Yes, so for example, on biology, the way we’ve defined it — and we’re still refining the test, but the way we’ve defined it is, relative to use of a Google search, there’s a substantial increase in risk as would be evaluated by, say, the national security community of misuse of biology, creation of bioweapons, that either the proliferation or spread of it is greater than it was before, or the capabilities are substantially greater than it was before.

We’ll probably have some more exact quantitative thing, working with folks who are ex-government biodefense folks, but something like this accounts for 20 percent of the total source of risk of biological attacks, or something increases the risk by 20 percent or something like that. So that would be a very concrete version of it. It’s just, it takes us time to develop very concrete criteria. So that would be like A.S.L. 3.

A.S.L. 4 is going to be more about, on the misuse side, enabling state-level actors to greatly increase their capability, which is much harder than enabling random people. So where we would worry that North Korea or China or Russia could greatly enhance their offensive capabilities in various military areas with A.I. in a way that would give them a substantial advantage at the geopolitical level. And on the autonomy side, it’s various measures of these models are pretty close to being able to replicate and survive in the wild.

So it feels maybe one step short of models that would, I think, raise truly existential questions. And so, I think what I’m saying is when we get to that latter stage, that A.S.L. 4, that is when I think it may make sense to think about what is the role of government in stewarding this technology.

Again, I don’t really know what it looks like. You’re right. All of these companies have investors. They have folks involved. You talk about just handing the models over. I suspect there’s some way to hand over the most dangerous or societally sensitive components or capabilities of the models without fully turning off the commercial tap. I don’t know that there’s a solution that every single actor is happy with. But again, I get to this idea of demonstrating specific risk.

If you look at times in history, like World War I or World War II, industries’ will can be bent towards the state. They can be gotten to do things that aren’t necessarily profitable in the short-term because they understand that there’s an emergency. Right now, we don’t have an emergency. We just have a line on a graph that weirdos like me believe in and a few people like you who are interviewing me may somewhat believe in. We don’t have clear and present danger.

EZRA KLEIN: When you imagine how many years away, just roughly, A.S.L. 3 is and how many years away A.S.L. 4 is, right, you’ve thought a lot about this exponential scaling curve. If you just had to guess, what are we talking about?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I think A.S.L. 3 could easily happen this year or next year. I think A.S.L. 4 —

EZRA KLEIN: Oh, Jesus Christ.

DARIO AMODEI: No, no, I told you. I’m a believer in exponentials. I think A.S.L. 4 could happen anywhere from 2025 to 2028.

EZRA KLEIN: So that is fast.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, no, no, I’m truly talking about the near future here. I’m not talking about 50 years away. God grant me chastity, but not now. But “not now” doesn’t mean when I’m old and gray. I think it could be near term. I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I think it could be a near term thing.

EZRA KLEIN: But so then, if you think about this, I feel like what you’re describing, to go back to something we talked about earlier, that there’s been this step function for societal impact of A.I., the curve of the capabilities exponential, but every once in a while, something happens, ChatGPT, for instance, Midjourney with photos. And all of a sudden, a lot of people feel it. They realize what has happened and they react. They use it. They deploy it in their companies. They invest in it, whatever.

And it sounds to me like that is the structure of the political economy you’re describing here. Either something happens where the bioweapon capability is demonstrated or the offensive cyber weapon capability is demonstrated, and that freaks out the government, or possibly something happens, right? Describing World War I and World War II is your examples did not actually fill me with comfort because in order to bend industry to government’s will, in those cases, we had to have an actual world war. It doesn’t do it that easily.

You could use coronavirus, I think, as another example where there was a significant enough global catastrophe that companies and governments and even people did things you never would have expected. But the examples we have of that happening are something terrible. All those examples end up with millions of bodies.

I’m not saying that’s going to be true for A.I., but it does sound like that is a political economy. No, you can’t imagine it now, in the same way that you couldn’t have imagined the sort of pre and post-ChatGPT world exactly, but that something happens and the world changes. Like, it’s a step function everywhere.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think my positive version of this, not to be so — to get a little bit away from the doom and gloom, is that the dangers are demonstrated in a concrete way that is really convincing, but without something actually bad happening, right? I think the worst way to learn would be for something actually bad to happen. And I’m hoping every day that doesn’t happen, and we learn bloodlessly.

EZRA KLEIN: We’ve been talking here about conceptual limits and curves, but I do want, before we end, to reground us a little bit in the physical reality, right? I think that if you’re using A.I., it can feel like this digital bits and bytes, sitting in the cloud somewhere.

But what it is in a physical way is huge numbers of chips, data centers, an enormous amount of energy, all of which does rely on complicated supply chains. And what happens if something happens between China and Taiwan, and the makers of a lot of these chips become offline or get captured? How do you think about the necessity of compute power? And when you imagine the next five years, what does that supply chain look like? How does it have to change from where it is now? And what vulnerabilities exist in it?

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so one, I think this may end up being the greatest geopolitical issue of our time. And man, this relates to things that are way above my pay grade, which are military decisions about whether and how to defend Taiwan. All I can do is say what I think the implications for A.I. is. I think those implications are pretty stark. I think there’s a big question of like, OK, we built these powerful models.

One, is there enough supply to build them? Two is control over that supply, a way to think about safety issues or a way to think about balance of geopolitical power. And three, if those chips are used to build data centers, where are those data centers going to be? Are they going to be in the U.S.? Are they going to be in a U.S. ally? Are they going to be in the Middle East? Are they going to be in China?

All of those have enormous implications, and then the supply chain itself can be disrupted. And political and military decisions can be made on the basis of where things are. So it sounds like an incredibly sticky problem to me. I don’t know that I have any great insight on this. I mean, as a U.S. citizen and someone who believes in democracy, I am someone who hopes that we can find a way to build data centers and to have the largest quantity of chips available in the U.S. and allied democratic countries.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, there is some insight you should have into it, which is that you’re a customer here, right? And so, five years ago, the people making these chips did not realize what the level of demand for them was going to be. I mean, what has happened to Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable.

But also what is implied about the future of Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable. Rana Foroohar, the Financial Times, cited this market analysis. It would take 4,500 years for Nvidia’s future dividends to equal its current price, 4,500 years. So that is a view about how much Nvidia is going to be making in the next couple of years. It is really quite astounding.

I mean, you’re, in theory, already working on or thinking about how to work on the next generation of Claude. You’re going to need a lot of chips for that. You’re working with Amazon. Are you having trouble getting the amount of compute that you feel you need? I mean, are you already bumping up against supply constraints? Or has the supply been able to change, to adapt to you?

DARIO AMODEI: We’ve been able to get the compute that we need for this year, I suspect also for next year as well. I think once things get to 2026, 2027, 2028, then the amount of compute gets to levels that starts to strain the capabilities of the semiconductor industry. The semiconductor industry still mostly produces C.P.U.s, right? Just the things in your laptop, not the things in the data centers that train the A.I. models. But as the economic value of the GPUs goes up and up and up because of the value of the A.I. models, that’s going to switch over.

But you know what? At some point, you hit the limits of that or you hit the limits of how fast you can switch over. And so, again, I expect there to be a big supply crunch around data centers, around chips, and around energy and power for both regulatory and physics reasons, sometime in the next few years. And that’s a risk, but it’s also an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to think about how the technology can be governed.

And it’s also an opportunity, I’ll repeat again, to think about how democracies can lead. I think it would be very dangerous if the leaders in this technology and the holders of the main resources were authoritarian countries. The combination of A.I. and authoritarianism, both internally and on the international stage, is very frightening to me.

EZRA KLEIN: How about the question of energy? I mean, this requires just a tremendous amount of energy. And I mean, I’ve seen different numbers like this floating around. It very much could be in the coming years like adding a Bangladesh to the world’s energy usage. Or pick your country, right? I don’t know what exactly you all are going to be using by 2028.

Microsoft, on its own, is opening a new data center globally every three days. You have — and this is coming from a Financial Times article — federal projections for 20 new gas-fired power plants in the U.S. by 2024 to 2025. There’s a lot of talk about this being now a new golden era for natural gas because we have a bunch of it. There is this huge need for new power to manage all this data, to manage all this compute.

So, one, I feel like there’s a literal question of how do you get the energy you need and at what price, but also a more kind of moral, conceptual question of, we have real problems with global warming. We have real problems with how much energy we’re using. And here, we’re taking off on this really steep curve of how much of it we seem to be needing to devote to the new A.I. race.

DARIO AMODEI: It really comes down to, what are the uses that the model is being put to, right? So I think the worrying case would be something like crypto, right? I’m someone who’s not a believer that whatever the energy was that was used to mine the next Bitcoin, I think that was purely additive. I think that wasn’t there before. And I’m unable to think of any useful thing that’s created by that.

But I don’t think that’s the case with A.I. Maybe A.I. makes solar energy more efficient or maybe it solves controlled nuclear fusion, or maybe it makes geoengineering more stable or possible. But I don’t think we need to rely on the long run. There are some applications where the model is doing something that used to be automated, that used to be done by computer systems. And the model is able to do it faster with less computing time, right? Those are pure wins. And there are some of those.

There are others where it’s using the same amount of computing resources or maybe more computing resources, but to do something more valuable that saves labor elsewhere. Then there are cases where something used to be done by humans or in the physical world, and now it’s being done by the models. Maybe it does something that previously I needed to go into the office to do that thing. And now I no longer need to go into the office to do that thing.

So I don’t have to get in my car. I don’t have to use the gas that was used for that. The energy accounting for that is kind of hard. You compare it to the food that the humans eat and what the energy cost of producing that.

So in all honesty, I don’t think we have good answers about what fraction of the usage points one way and one fraction of the usage points to others. In many ways, how different is this from the general dilemma of, as the economy grows, it uses more energy?

So I guess, what I’m saying is, it kind of all matters how you use the technology. I mean, my kind of boring short-term answer is, we get carbon offsets for all of this stuff. But let’s look beyond that to the macro question here.

EZRA KLEIN: But to take the other side of it, I mean, I think the difference, when you say this is always a question we have when we’re growing G.D.P., is it’s not quite. It’s cliché because it’s true to say that the major global warming challenge right now is countries like China and India getting richer. And we want them to get richer. It is a huge human imperative, right, a moral imperative for poor people in the world to become less poor. And if that means they use more energy, then we just need to figure out how to make that work. And we don’t know of a way for that to happen without them using more energy.

Adding A.I. is not that it raises a whole different set of questions, but we’re already straining at the boundaries, or maybe far beyond them, of safely what we can do energetically. Now we add in this, and so maybe some of the energy efficiency gains you’re going to get in rich countries get wiped out. For this sort of uncertain payoff in the future of maybe through A.I., we figure out ways to stabilize nuclear fusion or something, right, you could imagine ways that could help, but those ways are theoretical.

And in the near term, the harm in terms of energy usage is real. And also, by the way, the harm in terms of just energy prices. It’s also just tricky because all these companies, Microsoft, Amazon, I mean, they all have a lot of renewable energy targets. Now if that is colliding with their market incentives, it feels like they’re running really fast towards the market incentives without an answer for how all that nets out.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, I mean, I think the concerns are real. Let me push back a little bit, which is, again, I don’t think the benefits are purely in the future. It kind of goes back to what I said before. Like, there may be use cases now that are net energy saving, or that to the extent that they’re not net energy saving, do so through the general mechanism of, oh, there was more demand for this thing.

I don’t think anyone has done a good enough job measuring, in part because the applications of A.I. are so new, which of those things dominate or what’s going to happen to the economy. But I don’t think we should assume that the harms are entirely in the present and the benefits are entirely in the future. I think that’s my only point here.

EZRA KLEIN: I guess you could imagine a world where we were, somehow or another, incentivizing uses of A.I. that were yoked to some kind of social purpose. We were putting a lot more into drug discovery, or we cared a lot about things that made remote work easier, or pick your set of public goods.

But what actually seems to me to be happening is we’re building more and more and more powerful models and just throwing them out there within a terms of service structure to say, use them as long as you’re not trying to politically manipulate people or create a bioweapon. Just try to figure this out, right? Try to create new stories and ask it about your personal life, and make a video game with it. And Sora comes out sooner or later. Make new videos with it. And all that is going to be very energy intensive.

I am not saying that I have a plan for yoking A.I. to social good, and in some ways, you can imagine that going very, very wrong. But it does mean that for a long time, it’s like you could imagine the world you’re talking about, but that would require some kind of planning that nobody is engaged in, and I don’t think anybody even wants to be engaged in.

DARIO AMODEI: Not everyone has the same conception of social good. One person may think social good is this ideology. Another person — we’ve seen that with some of the Gemini stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: Right.

DARIO AMODEI: But companies can try to make beneficial applications themselves, right? Like, this is why we’re working with cancer institutes. We’re hoping to partner with ministries of education in Africa, to see if we can use the models in kind of a positive way for education, rather than the way they may be used by default. So I think individual companies, individual people, can take actions to steer or bend this towards the public good.

That said, it’s never going to be the case that 100 percent of what we do is that. And so I think it’s a good question. What are the societal incentives, without dictating ideology or defining the public good from on high, what are incentives that could help with this?

I don’t feel like I have a systemic answer either. I can only think in terms of what Anthropic tries to do.

EZRA KLEIN: But there’s also the question of training data and the intellectual property that is going into things like Claude, like GPT, like Gemini. There are a number of copyright lawsuits. You’re facing some. OpenAI is facing some. I suspect everybody is either facing them now or will face them.

And a broad feeling that these systems are being trained on the combined intellectual output of a lot of different people — the way that Claude can quite effectively mimic the way I write is it has been trained, to some degree, on my writing, right? So it actually does get my stylistic tics quite well. You seem great, but you haven’t sent me a check on that. And this seems like somewhere where there is real liability risk for the industry. Like, what if you do actually have to compensate the people who this is being trained on? And should you?

And I recognize you probably can’t comment on lawsuits themselves, but I’m sure you’ve had to think a lot about this. And so, I’m curious both how you understand it as a risk, but also how you understand it morally. I mean, when you talk about the people who invent these systems gaining a lot of power, and alongside that, a lot of wealth, well, what about all the people whose work went into them such that they can create images in a million different styles?

And I mean, somebody came up with those styles. What is the responsibility back to the intellectual commons? And not just to the commons, but to the actual wages and economic prospects of the people who made all this possible?

DARIO AMODEI: I think everyone agrees the models shouldn’t be verbatim outputting copyrighted content. For things that are available on the web, for publicly available, our position — and I think there’s a strong case for it — is that the training process, again, we don’t think it’s just hoovering up content and spitting it out, or it shouldn’t be spitting it out. It’s really much more like the process of how a human learns from experiences. And so, our position that that is sufficiently transformative, and I think the law will back this up, that this is fair use.

But those are narrow legal ways to think about the problem. I think we have a broader issue, which is that regardless of how it was trained, it would still be the case that we’re building more and more general cognitive systems, and that those systems will create disruption. Maybe not necessarily by one for one replacing humans, but they’re really going to change how the economy works and which skills are valued. And we need a solution to that broad macroeconomic problem, right?

As much as I’ve asserted the narrow legal points that I asserted before, we have a broader problem here, and we shouldn’t be blind to that. There’s a number of solutions. I mean, I think the simplest one, which I recognize doesn’t address some of the deeper issues here, is things around the kind of guaranteed basic income side of things.

But I think there’s a deeper question here, which is like as A.I. systems become capable of larger and larger slices of cognitive labor, how does society organize itself economically? How do people find work and meaning and all of that?

And just as kind of we transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society and the meaning of work changed, and it was no longer true that 99 percent of people were peasants working on farms and had to find new methods of economic organization, I suspect there’s some different method of economic organization that’s going to be forced as the only possible response to disruptions to the economy that will be small at first, but will grow over time, and that we haven’t worked out what that is. We need to find something that allows people to find meaning that’s humane and that maximizes our creativity and potential and flourishing from A.I.

And as with many of these questions, I don’t have the answer to that. Right? I don’t have a prescription. But that’s what we somehow need to do.

EZRA KLEIN: But I want to sit in between the narrow legal response and the broad “we have to completely reorganize society” response, although I think that response is actually possible over the decades. And in the middle of that is a more specific question. I mean, you could even take it from the instrumental side. There is a lot of effort now to build search products that use these systems, right? ChatGPT will use Bing to search for you.

And that means that the person is not going to Bing and clicking on the website where ChatGPT is getting its information and giving that website an advertising impression that they can turn into a very small amount of money, or they’re not going to that website and having a really good experience with that website and becoming maybe likelier to subscribe to whoever is behind that website.

And so, on the one hand, that seems like some kind of injustice done to the people creating the information that these systems are using. I mean, this is true for perplexity. It’s true for a lot of things I’m beginning to see around where the A.I.s are either trained on or are using a lot of data that people have generated at some real cost. But not only are they not paying people for that, but they’re actually stepping into the middle of where they would normally be a direct relationship and making it so that relationship never happens.

That also, I think, in the long run, creates a training data problem, even if you just want to look at it instrumentally, where if it becomes nonviable to do journalism or to do a lot of things to create high quality information out there, the A.I.’s ability, right, the ability of all of your companies to get high quality, up-to-date, constantly updated information becomes a lot trickier. So there both seems to me to be both a moral and a self-interested dimension to this.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, so I think there may be business models that work for everyone, not because it’s illegitimate to train on open data from the web in a legal sense, but just because there may be business models here that kind of deliver a better product. So things I’m thinking of are like newspapers have archives. Some of them aren’t publicly available. But even if they are, it may be a better product, maybe a better experience, to, say, talk to this newspaper or talk to that newspaper.

It may be a better experience to give the ability to interact with content and point to places in the content, and every time you call that content, to have some kind of business relationship with the creators of that content. So there may be business models here that propagate the value in the right way, right? You talk about LLMs using search products. I mean, sure, you’re going around the ads, but there’s no reason it can’t work in a different way, right?

There’s no reason that the users can’t pay the search A.P.I.s, instead of it being paid through advertising, and then have that propagate through to wherever the original mechanism is that paid the creators of the content. So when value is being created, money can flow through.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me try to end by asking a bit about how to live on the slope of the curve you believe we are on. Do you have kids?

DARIO AMODEI: I’m married. I do not have kids.

EZRA KLEIN: So I have two kids. I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. And particularly when I’m doing A.I. reporting, I really do sit in bed at night and think, what should I be doing here with them? What world am I trying to prepare them for? And what is needed in that world that is different from what is needed in this world, even if I believe there’s some chance — and I do believe there’s some chance — that all the things you’re saying are true. That implies a very, very, very different life for them.

I know people in your company with kids. I know they are thinking about this. How do you think about that? I mean, what do you think should be different in the life of a two-year-old who is living through the pace of change that you are telling me is true here? If you had a kid, how would this change the way you thought about it?

DARIO AMODEI: The very short answer is, I don’t know, and I have no idea, but we have to try anyway, right? People have to raise kids, and they have to do it as best they can. An obvious recommendation is just familiarity with the technology and how it works, right? The basic paradigm of, I’m talking to systems, and systems are taking action on my behalf, obviously, as much familiarity with that as possible is, I think, helpful.

In terms of what should children learn in school, what are the careers of tomorrow, I just truly don’t know, right? You could take this to say, well, it’s important to learn STEM and programming and A.I. and all of that. But A.I. will impact that as well, right? I don’t think any of it is going to —

EZRA KLEIN: Possibly first.

DARIO AMODEI: Yeah, right, possibly first.

EZRA KLEIN: It seems better at coding than it is at other things.

DARIO AMODEI: I don’t think it’s going to work out for any of these systems to just do one for one what humans are going to do. I don’t really think that way. But I think it may fundamentally change industries and professions one by one in ways that are hard to predict. And so, I feel like I only have clichés here. Like get familiar with the technology. Teach your children to be adaptable, to be ready for a world that changes very quickly. I wish I had better answers, but I think that’s the best I got.

EZRA KLEIN: I agree that’s not a good answer. [LAUGHS] Let me ask that same question a bit from another direction, because one thing you just said is get familiar with the technology. And the more time I spend with the technology, the more I fear that happening. What I see when people use A.I. around me is that the obvious thing that technology does for you is automate the early parts of the creative process.

The part where you’re supposed to be reading something difficult yourself? Well, the A.I. can summarize it for you. The part where you’re supposed to sit there with a blank page and write something? Well, the A.I. can give you a first draft. And later on, you have to check it and make sure it actually did what you wanted it to do and fact-checking it. And but I believe a lot of what makes humans good at thinking comes in those parts.

And I am older and have self-discipline, and maybe this is just me hanging on to an old way of doing this, right? You could say, why use a calculator from this perspective. But my actual worry is that I’m not sure if the thing they should do is use A.I. a lot or use it a little.

This, to me, is actually a really big branching path, right? Do I want my kids learning how to use A.I. or being in a context where they’re using it a lot, or actually, do I want to protect them from it as much as I possibly could so they develop more of the capacity to read a book quietly on their own or write a first draft? I actually don’t know. I’m curious if you have a view on it.

DARIO AMODEI: I think this is part of what makes the interaction between A.I. and society complicated where it’s sometimes hard to distinguish when is an A.I. doing something, saving you labor or drudge work, versus kind of doing the interesting part. I will say that over and over again, you’ll get some technological thing, some technological system that does what you thought was the core of what you’re doing, and yet, what you’re doing turns out to have more pieces than you think it does and kind of add up to more things, right?

It’s like before, I used to have to ask for directions. I got Google Maps to do that. And you could worry, am I too reliant on Google Maps? Do I forget the environment around me? Well, it turns out, in some ways, I still need to have a sense of the city and the environment around me. It just kind of reallocates the space in my brain to some other aspect of the task.

And I just kind of suspect — I don’t know. Internally, within Anthropic, one of the things I do that helps me run the company is, I’ll write these documents on strategy or just some thinking in some direction that others haven’t thought. And of course, I sometimes use the internal models for that. And I think what I found is like, yes, sometimes they’re a little bit good at conceptualizing the idea, but the actual genesis of the idea, I’ve just kind of found a workflow where I don’t use them for that. They’re not that helpful for that. But they’re helpful in figuring out how to phrase a certain thing or how to refine my ideas.

So maybe I’m just saying — I don’t know. You just find a workflow where the thing complements you. And if it doesn’t happen naturally, it somehow still happens eventually. Again, if the systems get general enough, if they get powerful enough, we may need to think along other lines. But in the short-term, I, at least, have always found that. Maybe that’s too sanguine. Maybe that’s too optimistic.

EZRA KLEIN: I think, then, that’s a good place to end this conversation. Though, obviously, the exponential curve continues. So always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

DARIO AMODEI: So, yeah, I’ve prepared three. They’re all topical, though, in some cases, indirectly so. The first one will be obvious. It’s a very long book. The physical book is very thick, but “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” Richard Rhodes. It’s an example of technology being developed very quickly and with very broad implications. Just looking through all the characters and how they reacted to this and how people who were basically scientists gradually realized the incredible implications of the technology and how it would lead them into a world that was very different from the one they were used to.

My second recommendation is a science fiction series, “The Expanse” series of books. So I initially watched the show, and then I read all the books. And the world it creates is very advanced. In some cases, it has longer life spans, and humans have expanded into space. But we still face some of the same geopolitical questions and some of the same inequalities and exploitations that exist in our world, are still present, in some cases, worse.

That’s all the backdrop of it. And the core of it is about some fundamentally new technological object that is being brought into that world and how everyone reacts to it, how governments react to it, how individual people react to it, and how political ideologies react to it. And so, I don’t know. When I read that a few years ago, I saw a lot of parallels.

And then my third recommendation would be actually “The Guns of August,” which is basically a history of how World War I started. The basic idea that crises happen very fast, almost no one knows what’s going on. There are lots of miscalculations because there are humans at the center of it, and kind of, we somehow have to learn to step back and make wiser decisions in these key moments. It’s said that Kennedy read the book before the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so I hope our current policymakers are at least thinking along the same terms because I think it is possible similar crises may be coming our way.

EZRA KLEIN: Dario Amodei, thank you very much.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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