Are chatbots sophisticated enough to debunk conspiracy theories?

Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. 

But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out that many conspiracy believers do respond to evidence and arguments—information that is now easy to deliver in the form of a tailored conversation with an AI chatbot.

In research we published in the journal Science this year, we had over 2,000 conspiracy believers engage in a roughly eight-minute conversation with DebunkBot, a model we built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo …. A three-round back-and-forth text chat with the AI model led to a 20% decrease in participants’ confidence in the belief, and about one in four participants—all of whom believed the conspiracy theory beforehand—indicated that they did not believe it after the conversation.

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This is good news, given the outsize role that unfounded conspiracy theories play in today’s political landscape. So while there are widespread and legitimate concerns that generative AI is a potent tool for spreading disinformation, our work shows that it can also be part of the solution. 

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here