AI chatbots might be better at swaying conspiracy theorists than humans
Then it was time for the one-on-one dialogues with the chatbot, which the team programmed to be as persuasive as possible. The chatbot had also been fed the open-ended responses of the participants, which made it better to tailor its counter-arguments individually. For example, if someone thought 9/11 was an inside job and cited as evidence the fact that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel, the chatbot might counter with, say, the NIST report showing that steel loses its strength at much lower temperatures, sufficient to weaken the towers’ structures so that it collapsed. Someone who thought 9/11 was an inside job and cited demolitions as evidence would get a different response tailored to that.
Participants then answered the same set of questions after their dialogues with the chatbot, which lasted about eight minutes on average. Costello et al. found that these targeted dialogues resulted in a 20 percent decrease in the participants’ misinformed beliefs—a reduction that persisted even two months later when participants were evaluated again.
As Bence Bago (Tilburg University) and Jean-Francois Bonnefon (CNRS, Toulouse, France) noted in an accompanying perspective, this is a substantial effect compared to the 1 to 6 percent drop in beliefs achieved by other interventions. They also deemed the persistence of the effect noteworthy, while cautioning that two months is “insufficient to completely eliminate misinformed conspiracy beliefs.”
Just the facts…
This chatbot approach proved effective for a wide range of conspiracy theories, from classics like the JFK assassination, Moon landing hoaxes, and the Illuminati, to more recent examples like the 2020 election fraud claims and COVID-19. “We also got these smaller spillover effects, showing that to some extent it was making people less generally conspiratorial,” said co-author David Rand, a cognitive scientist at MIT. “It also increased their intentions to do things like ignore or block social media accounts sharing conspiracies. So it seemed like it worked, and really worked broadly. [The chatbot] is able to really meet people exactly where they are rather than just providing general blanket debunks.”
