AI chatbots can help conspiracy theory addicts

Even the most hardcore conspiracy theory addicts can be brought back to reality by conversations with AI chatbots, scientists claim.

“It has become almost a truism that people ‘down the rabbit hole’ of conspiracy belief are almost impossible to reach,” write the authors.

“In contrast to this pessimistic view, we [show] that a relatively brief conversation with a generative AI model can produce a large and lasting decrease in conspiracy beliefs, even among people whose beliefs are deeply entrenched.”

In a series of experiments involving 2,190 conspiracy believers, participants engaged in personalised interactions with advanced chatbots, sharing their conspiratorial beliefs and the evidence they felt supported them.

The chatbots responded by directly refuting these claims through tailored, factual and evidence-based counterarguments.

Researchers found that these AI-driven dialogues reduced participants’ misinformed beliefs by an average of 20 per cent.

This effect lasted for at least 2 months and was observed across various unrelated conspiracy theories, as well as across demographic categories.

“It has become almost a truism that people ‘down the rabbit hole’ of conspiracy belief are almost impossible to reach,” the authors wrote in the journal Science.

“In contrast to this pessimistic view, we show that a relatively brief conversation with a generative AI model can produce a large and lasting decrease in conspiracy beliefs, even among people whose beliefs are deeply entrenched.”