An AI chatbot helped Americans who believe in conspiracy theories “exit the rabbit hole”

The Weekly Wrap: September 13, 2024

An AI chatbot helped Americans who believe in conspiracy theories “exit the rabbit hole”

The uncle who believes 9/11 never happened. The next-door neighbor who thinks Biden stole the 2020 election. The Nieman Lab editor who’s been known to wonder if aliens do exist and the U.S. government is covering them up.

You probably don’t want to talk to these people and convince them that they are wrong. But what if an AI chatbot could do it for you? That’s exactly what a group of researchers just did. In their peer-reviewed article “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI,” featured on the cover of Science this week, Thomas Costello of American University, Gordon Pennycook of Cornell, and David Rand of MIT explain how they put 2,190 conspiracy-believing Americans in brief but detailed conversation with the large language model GPT-4 Turbo.

Those conversations worked: They “reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average,” the authors write. The effect “persisted undiminished for at least 2 months” and “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 U.S. presidential election, and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched and important to their identities.”

The studies suggest that, contrary to the common belief that people “down the rabbit hole” are beyond rescue, they can actually be brought back. They also offer a compelling demonstration of “the potential positive impacts of generative AI when deployed responsibly,” the authors write — and “the pressing importance of minimizing opportunities for this technology to be used irresponsibly.”

David Rand, study coauthor and the Erwin H. Schell Professor and professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, told me the research is novel. He’s pretty sure this is the first study that’s used an LLM to reduce conspiracy beliefs — but broad studies haven’t been done with real people in the AI’s debunking role, either. “One of the issues is that it’s impossible, from a practical perspective, to find a human expert to debunk the wide variety of conspiracy theories participants believe,” he said.

In one of the studies, each participant

rated their belief in 15 popular conspiracy theories…completed a distractor task, and were then asked to identify and describe a particular conspiracy theory they believed in (not necessarily one of the 15 rated earlier) as well as providing details about evidence or experiences supporting their belief. In real time, the AI created a summary statement of each participant’s free-text conspiratorial belief description, and each participant was then asked to indicate their belief in the AI summary of their conspiracy statement — providing a pretreatment measure of belief.

Participants, who were “quota matched to the U.S. census on age, gender, race, and ethnicity,” were then randomly assigned to either have a three-round conversation with the AI about their “favored conspiracy belief” or to chat with the AI about a neutral topic.

One of the most fascinating parts of this experiment is that you can read through all of the AI’s thousands of conversations with human participants. They’re here, arranged by conspiracy belief, and filterable by how effective the intervention was (i.e., how much a person changed their mind before and after the conversation with GPT-4 Turbo.) I loved reading through some of the conversations and put excerpts at the bottom of this post.

I was really struck by how polite both the GPT and most of the respondents were, and asked Rand if participants somehow see the AI chatbot as being objective in a way another human wouldn’t be. That’s possible, he said, but noted that “in a not-yet-published followup we explicitly told participants that the AI was going to try to talk them out of believing the conspiracy, or that they were supposed to have a debate with the AI, and it still worked just as well. So telling people the AI isn’t neutral doesn’t undermine the effect.”

People who trust AI less did show a smaller effect in their belief change, Rand said, “but it still works even for people who strongly distrust AI.” In another follow-up study, the researchers had GPT-4 explain structural racism to Republicans. “Although a lot of people accuse the AI of being ‘woke,’ etc.,” he said, “it still works pretty much as well as the conspiracy debunking bot.”

As for the robotic level of politeness? “It is definitely very polite and does a lot of rapport building,” Rand acknowledged — so they tested that in yet another follow-up study: “We tell it not to do that and instead just present the facts, etc., and it still works just as well. So I think the politeness isn’t key, and instead it’s about the facts and evidence. On the flip side, though, I bet it would work less well if it was outright rude.” (That said: He pointed to other studies suggesting that, in misinformation correction, tone doesn’t matter that much.)

Read on for conversation excerpts and read the full paper here.

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

An AI chatbot helped Americans who believe in conspiracy theories “exit the rabbit hole” “It still works even for people who strongly distrust AI.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

Documentary filmmakers publish new AI ethics guidelines. Are news broadcasters next? The Archival Producers Alliance’s new generative AI guardrails put audience transparency first. By Andrew Deck.

Mobile newsrooms help drive citizen journalism in North Macedonia and beyond “With each region we visited, the audience from that region grew, and they have continued to follow us to this day.” By Lex Doig.

The California Google deal could leave out news startups and the smallest publishers “We don’t know whether or how this nonprofit and its fund will operate, and likely won’t for some months (nonprofit governance is many things, but fast is not one of them).” By Sophie Culpepper.

With an expansion on the way, Ken Doctor’s Lookout thinks it has some answers to the local news crisis After finding success — and a Pulitzer Prize — in Santa Cruz, Lookout aims to replicate its model in Oregon. “All of these playbooks are at least partially written. You sometimes hear people say, ‘Nobody’s figured it out yet.’ But this is all about execution.” By Joshua Benton.

Big tech is painting itself as journalism’s savior. We should tread carefully. “We set out to explore how big tech’s ‘philanthrocapitalism’ could be reshaping the news industry, focusing on countries in the Global South…Our findings suggest an emerging web of dependency between cash-strapped newsrooms and Silicon Valley’s deep pockets.” By Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos.

Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A conversation with Steve Grove “We would like to see at least 25% of our P&L look different in a couple of years than it does now…I don’t think any media company right now can just be banking on subscriptions to save the day.” By Richard Tofel.

The old Recode Media podcast is returning to a familiar home Highlights from elsewhereCNN / Brian StelterNews outlets see debate spike →“At The Washington Post, Wednesday was the outlet’s highest-reach day of the year, staffers were told, as post-debate coverage drew millions of readers. Another example: Slate had its best day of the year Wednesday in terms of page views. In the entertainment realm, Jon Stewart’s post-debate “Daily Show” was the late-night show’s highest rating telecast in seven years.”Columbia Journalism Review / Jon AllsopIs the press “sane-washing” Trump? →“It’s worth noting that the sanewashing phenomenon figures into a debate that is almost as old as Trump’s political career itself, and legitimately thorny: whether to expose news consumers more to his rhetoric, or shut it out.”The Atlantic / Paul FarhiNo, Trump has not been “sane-washed” →“The sane-washing charge channels the critic’s exasperation at the fact that something like half the electorate still intends to vote for Trump, despite nearly a decade of his schtick. It implicitly suggests that voters would come to their senses and reject him if only the media would stop making him sound more normal than he really is. The likelier theory is that those voters are aware of the crazy and don’t mind it — and that the subset who somehow don’t know about it are not exactly avid news readers. An April poll by NBC News found that voters who read newspapers preferred Joe Biden over Trump 70% to 21%, whereas Trump led 53% to 27% among people who said they don’t follow political news.”Mather Economics / Peter Doucette and Matt LindsayFor U.S. newspapers, new digital subscriptions outnumber print 2-to-1 — but print still generates almost 75% of their revenue →“Traditionally, publishers have relied on aggressive print pricing to counter declining advertising revenues. However, there’s been a noticeable shift toward more conservative strategies in recent years, bringing the concept of the ‘print runway’ to the forefront. Decision-makers are now focused on how they can sustain print revenue while reducing costs and funding their digital transformation.”The Verge / Kevin NguyenThis hot new Broadway thriller is all about…content moderation →“I was really fascinated at this idea that to do the most passive brain rot-y activity of scrolling mindlessly on my phone, there was a real human labor cost and that these spiritual and physical and scientific laws of equivalence still apply to the internet.”The Independent / Amy-Clare MartinU.K. counter-terrorism police are investigating the sudden death of a 32-year-old Telegraph journalist who’d drawn Russia’s ire →“David Knowles, 32, who worked on the successful weekday podcast ‘Ukraine: The Latest,’ died while on holiday in Gibraltar on Sunday after suffering a suspected cardiac arrest…His podcast on the Russia-Ukraine war was described as a runaway success with almost 100 million downloads. Mr. Knowles was last year added to a list of people banned from entering Russia, alongside many other U.K. journalists because of their work covering the conflict.”MIT Technology Review / Chris LewisWhy a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries →“This decision also renders the fair use doctrine—legally crucial in everything from parody to education to news reporting—almost unusable. And while there were occasional moments of sanity (such as recognizing that a ‘Donate here’ button does not magically turn a nonprofit into a commercial enterprise), this decision fractured, rather than clarified, the law.”Los Angeles Times / Jenny JarviePhilanthropists invest $15 million in L.A. County local news →“Funded by organizations including the American Journalism Project, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Spiegel Family Fund, the initiative will support a network of community-first media outlets to report across digital, print and radio platforms for L.A. County’s 10 million residents. Those hyperlocal outlets will work in partnership with CalMatters, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on explaining California politics and policy, and LAist, part of the Southern California Public Radio group, to deliver enhanced regional accountability journalism that fills news gaps.”The Atlantic / Arash AziziThe dangerous rise of the podcast historians →“‘I think the podcast media is intrinsically tough because a lot of people go to podcasts for what I call ‘shortcut learning,’ and that lends itself to the charlatans and self-styled non-PC ‘truth tellers,’ from [Joe] Rogan to Tucker,’ [said] Joseph Stieb, a historian at the U.S. Naval War College and an avid user of X.”

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