Scientists surprised themselves when they found they could instruct a version of ChatGPT to gently dissuade people of their beliefs in conspiracy theories - such as notions that Covid-19 was a deliberate attempt at population control or that 9/11 was an inside job.
The most important revelation wasn't about the power of artificial intelligence (AI), but about the workings of the human mind. The experiment punctured the popular myth that we're in a post-truth era where evidence no longer matters, and it flew in the face of a prevailing view in psychology that people cling to conspiracy theories for emotional reasons and that no amount of evidence can ever disabuse them.
"It's really the most uplifting research I've ever done," said psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University and one of the authors of the study. Study subjects were surprisingly amenable to evidence when it was presented the right way.
The researchers asked more than 2,000 volunteers to interact with a chatbot - GPT-4 Turbo, a large language model (LLM) - about beliefs that might be considered conspiracy theories. The subjects typed their beliefs into a box and the LLM would decide if it fit the researchers' definition of a conspiracy theory. It asked participants to rate how sure they were of their beliefs on a scale of 0 per cent to 100 per cent. Then it asked the volunteers for their evidence.
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