Conspiracy - Reducing Fake News & Disinformation

Uploaded on 2024-10-09 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, FREE TO VIEW

Widespread belief in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories is a major source of public concern and a focus of scholarly research. Despite often being highly implausible, many such conspiracies are widely believed.

Now, researchers say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be a valuable tool in the fight against conspiracy theories, by designing a chatbot that can debunk false information and get people to question their thinking.

In a study published in Science, participants spent a few minutes interacting with the chatbot, which provided detailed responses and arguments, and experienced a shift in thinking that lasted for months. This result suggests that facts and evidence really can change people’s minds.

Prominent psychological theories propose that many people want to adopt conspiracy theories, to satisfy underlying psychic “needs” or motivations, and thus, believers cannot be convinced to abandon these unfounded and implausible beliefs using facts and counter evidence. However it may be possible to talk people out of the conspiratorial “rabbit hole” with sufficiently compelling evidence.

Interventions based on factual, corrective information may seem ineffective simply because they lack sufficient depth and personalisation.

To test this hypothesis,researchers leveraged advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), a form of AI that has access to vast amounts of information and the ability to generate bespoke arguments. LLMs can thereby directly refute particular evidence each individual cites as supporting their conspiratorial beliefs.

The researchers developed a pipeline for conducting behavioural science research using real-time, personalised interactions between research subjects and AI and across two experiments, 2,190 US subjects articulated, in their own words, a conspiracy theory in which they believe, along with the evidence they think supports this theory. They then engaged in a three-round conversation with the LLM GPT-4 Turbo, which was prompted to respond to this specific evidence while trying to reduce participants’ belief in the conspiracy theory, or, as a control condition, to converse with the AI about an unrelated topic.

On average, the treatment reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20%

This effect persisted undiminished for at least 2 months; was consistently observed across a wide range of conspiracy theories, from classic conspiracies involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy, aliens, and the illuminati, to those pertaining to topical events such as COVID-19 and the 2020 US presidential election, and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched and important to their identities.

The researchers added that reducing belief in one conspiracy theory appeared to reduce participants’ belief in other such ideas, at least to a small degree, while the approach could have applications in the real world, for example, AI could reply to posts relating to conspiracy theories on social media.

Many people who strongly believe in seemingly fact-resistant beliefs can change their minds when presented with compelling evidence. Psychological needs and motivations do not inherently blind believers in conspiracies to factual information, it simply takes the right evidence to reach them.

By demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs, these findings emphasise both the potential positive impacts of generative AI when deployed responsibly and the pressing importance of minimising opportunities for this technology to be used irresponsibly.

Science | The Guardian | Nature | NDTV | Gizmodo

Image: Darya Grey_Owl

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