2026 AI-HUB@LMU Prize Winner: Ilia Frantzi

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Celebrating the 2026 AI-HUB@LMU Prize Winner: Ilia Frantzi

We are proud to announce Ilia Frantzi (Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics) as recipient of the AI-HUB@LMU Prize for the best Master's Thesis, for her work “Conversations with AI: How do language models influence our beliefs?“

The Jury remarked: "The thesis provides experimental evidence on how large language models shape users' beliefs in LLM conversations, revealing that opinion shifts occur even without explicit persuasive instructions and that persuasive capacity varies asymmetrically with the model's encoded tendencies. It stands out for its rigorous preregistered experimental design, its inventive combination of causal inference, semantic embedding analysis, and LLM-assisted qualitative coding, and its highly implications for AI safety and user autonomy in everyday human-AI interaction."

Congratulations!

Join us in celebrating all prize winners at the AI-HUB@LMU KI-Symposium 2026 on 09 November 2026.

Our thanks go to the Münchener Universitätsgesellschaft for their support in endowing this prize and to the interdisciplinary review panel for their careful evaluation of all submissions.