Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories

The findings could represent an important step forward in how we engage with and educate people who espouse such baseless theories, says Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang, a postdoc fellow affiliated with the Psychology of Technology Institute who studies AI's impacts on society. "They show that with the help of large language models, we can--I wouldn't say solve it, but we can at least mitigate this problem," he says. "It points out a way to make society better." Few interventions have been proven to change conspiracy theorists' minds, says Thomas Costello, a research affiliate at MIT Sloan and the lead author of the study. Part of what makes it so hard is that different people tend to latch on to different parts of a theory.