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- [00:01]
Sleep Number Advertiser
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- [00:36]
Sanjay Gupta
Hey everyone, it's Sanjay. This week I wanted to share CNN's newest podcast with you. It's called Terms of Service and it's all about the new technologies that are changing our world every day. We're talking AI, facial recognition, social media. Longtime listeners will know that as a dad and a doctor, these are issues that I am really curious about. Each week, CNN tech writer Claire Duffy will break down how these technologies work and what they might mean for your life. In this episode, Claire talks with a psychologist about a new study exploring this Can AI chatbots help us debunk conspiracy theories? It's a really fascinating episode and I hope you enjoy it. Our Chasing Life team will be back next week with an all new episode about alcohol's impact on our health and the rise of something known as the mocktail Intermittent Sobriety. You won't want to miss it. In the meantime, I wish you a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.
- [01:47]
Claire Duffy
Welcome to another episode of Terms of Service. I'm Claire Duffy and today we're going deep on conspiracy theories which have become more prevalent as we all spend more time online. Recently, I came across this study that took people who believe in various conspiracies and asked them to talk it out with an AI chatbot. And honestly, I was surprised by how willing these folks were to engage with the technology. It got me thinking about some of the conspiracy theories that, with the help of social media, have gone more mainstream in recent years. Could AI chatbots really be a helpful tool for pushing back on these false narratives? I'm going to speak with the co author of that study in a bit about what they found. But first I wanted to chat with a colleague of mine who spent a lot of time interviewing conspiracy theory believers. I have CNN Senior Correspondent Donie O'Sullivan here with me in the studio. Hey, Donie.
- [02:42]
Donie O'Sullivan
Hi, Claire. How are you?
- [02:43]
Claire Duffy
I'm good. Thanks for doing this.
- [02:44]
Donie O'Sullivan
Thank you for having me.
- [02:45]
Claire Duffy
Okay, so Donie, you've done A ton of reporting on how online misinformation and conspiracy theories manifest in the offline world for nearly a decade now. What have you learned about the people who believe in these stories that are just not true?
- [03:00]
Donie O'Sullivan
It's less about what people believe, it's more about why they are believing it. What are they getting out of that set of beliefs? And a lot of times it comes down to people are looking for meaning, they're looking for connection, they're looking for community that they are not getting elsewhere.
- [03:15]
Claire Duffy
Talk to me about some of the conspiracy theories that folks you've interviewed believe in.
- [03:20]
Donie O'Sullivan
Oh, pretty much everything from anti vaxxers to QAnon to people who believe that JFK wasn't really assassinated or that he's still alive. You know, there's a whole spectrum there of kind of things that define and consume people's lives. What does JFK have to do with all of this?
- [03:41]
Thomas Costello
He is Jesus reincarnated.
- [03:43]
Donie O'Sullivan
You don't believe Taylor Swift is a Goldman sayop?
- [03:46]
Thomas Costello
I don't know what to believe about Taylor Swift.
- [03:48]
Donie O'Sullivan
What happens if Trump loses? I don't see him losing. I don't think he lost the last election, to be honest.
- [03:55]
Claire Duffy
As some of these conspiracy theories gain larger followings, what have you seen in terms of what that means for people's lives and for their family or loved ones Lives?
- [04:05]
Donie O'Sullivan
Yeah, I think it's ruining a lot of lives and it's ruining a lot of families. There's a broad spectrum of course, of like having somebody in your life who's bringing this up every now and then and maybe listening to some fritting stuff and then all the way to, you know, somebody who has gone to join a cult or is showing up on January 6th to storm the Capitol. There's a lot of space in between where there's people causing real tension in families, real friction, because so much conspiracy theories are based in fear.
- [04:36]
Claire Duffy
So I'm curious what you think of this study. I honestly was quite skeptical when I came across this idea that an AI chatbot could sort of talk people out of their conspiracy theory beliefs. Talk to me about your reaction when you saw this.
- [04:51]
Donie O'Sullivan
Yeah, there's so many studies when it comes to misinformation, but I was surprised. I mean, I do this for a full time job and I'm not equipped to push back on half of the conspiracy theories because they are so involved and so difficult to follow. So at some point you're going to get either frustrated or you don't have the answers. Whereas I guess an AI chatbot doesn't run into that issue. And AI can, I guess, present this also in a way as a neutral voice?
- [05:21]
Claire Duffy
How likely do you think folks are to want to engage with a chatbot that they know is going to challenge their beliefs in the real world?
- [05:30]
Donie O'Sullivan
Nobody wants to engage with people who challenge their beliefs freely. That is the other big hurdle, right? There has to be a willingness on the part of the person who believes this stuff to maybe admit to themselves that they might be wrong. If a person is showing some openness to seeing life beyond the conspiracy theory world they're in, you have to give them the space to say, maybe I'm wrong, but in a way that they don't feel like a total idiot or fool, because at that moment, it's a very difficult, vulnerable place to be. So if you had a tool like this, that it could actually be very useful.
- [06:11]
Claire Duffy
Well doneie, thanks so much.
- [06:13]
Donie O'Sullivan
Thank you.
- [06:15]
Claire Duffy
So Dhoni had a lot of the same questions about the study that I did. Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, and technology that could help change people's minds about them sounds useful. It could also be a more positive way to use a technology that some have feared could cause more confusion and distrust because it's so easy to create convincing fake content. But how realistic is this idea really? The authors of the study put more than 2,000 conspiracy believers in conversation with an AI chatbot, and by the end, a lot of participants felt differently than they did at the start. How did this actually work? And are there ways that we can use this technology even if we don't believe in conspiracy theories? To find out, I spoke with Thomas Costello, an assistant professor of psychology at American University who co authored the study. So, Thomas, talk to me about how you set up this experiment. What was your hypothesis going into it?
- [07:16]
Thomas Costello
We were testing whether an AI model could talk to people and deliver facts and evidence and change their mind about a conspiracy belief. And to get a little more specific, what we were testing was not so much the AI part, but whether facts and evidence might work to change conspiracy believers mind, to make them more skeptical. And in order to test that, we brought people in, we asked a very open ended question about whether there were any conspiracy theories that they believed. We put it in quotes and we provided a definition so as not to stigmatize, basically. So people wrote in a very open ended way about whether they believed anything and if so, what that was. And then we followed up and we had them provide all of the factual information they knew that supported the conspiracy. So if you wrote about the 911 conspiracy theory. You might talk about how jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, and there was evidence of a demolition team coming in, or, you know, those kinds of things.
- [08:10]
Claire Duffy
The study was conducted in waves. First they gathered data from paid participants. Then they opened the study to anyone on the Internet. And there was a wide range of conspiracy beliefs. Everything from the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen to theories about the death of Princess Diana, and even one Tom had never heard of about a Loch Ness monster in a lake in Montana.
- [08:34]
Thomas Costello
I think one of the advantages of this approach is that we were not curating or selecting on a particular conspiracy theory. So what we asked was there are some accounts of world events, important world events, that attribute them to powerful people scheming and secret, and the result is a phenomenon that's different from what the media or the popularly accepted stories will tell you. And then we said, some people call these conspiracy theories. Are there any such beliefs that you have?
- [09:07]
Claire Duffy
Researchers told participants that they'd be speaking with an AI chatbot. What they didn't tell them, they'd fed the information participants provided to the chatbot and programmed it to persuade against the conspiracy.
- [09:19]
Thomas Costello
And so it opened the conversation, typically in a very long, several paragraph response, where it said, I understand why you might think this conspiracy is true. It makes a lot of sense. I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, have you considered this alternative piece of evidence that you didn't write about? And, well, you talked about how jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, but it does burn hot enough to weaken them, and weakening them is enough for all of the weight on top of them in the Twin Towers to collapse, which is what happened, and so on and so forth. And it might ask, does that make sense? Do you have any questions? And the person would respond then, wow, I've never thought of it that way, perhaps. Or they'd say, screw you. What about all this other stuff? I don't believe you. Or you're a biased AI in some cases, but on balance, people did respond positively and did update their beliefs.
- [10:08]
Claire Duffy
Was this a mass market AI chatbot that you were using? Or did you have to train it with information about the conspiracy theories that you expected to come up so that it would know how to respond.
- [10:18]
Thomas Costello
So we used GPT4 Turbo, which at the time was one of the models that was undergirding ChatGPT. It wasn't prompted in exactly the same way, so it had slightly different kinds of behaviors. But for the most part, it was out of the box vanilla. The big caveat, though, is that OpenAI had already trained it to align with facts and evidence and to engage with misinformation in a constructive way. So in many respects, we were just building on top of what they had already done.
- [10:47]
Claire Duffy
Got it. But you didn't necessarily have to feed it a bunch of information about the Loch Ness monster in Montana or 911 in order to get it to respond.
- [10:57]
Thomas Costello
Right. Well, so it's been trained on the Internet, so it already knows all about conspiracy theories.
- [11:03]
Claire Duffy
The chatbot had thousands of conversations with people about their beliefs. They're actually available to read online. You can browse them by topic. We'll put a link in the show. Notes. I was looking through them. They're amazing. One of the ones I really loved is about aliens. The person says, I think the government knows about aliens. There's no way we are the only living beings in the universe. Just common sense, maybe. I don't know of any hard evidence. And it was so interesting to see the model respond in this really sort of empathetic way. Like it's common to wonder about the vastness of the universe. But, you know, as you said, it's important to consider the evidence. And then it's interesting that it doesn't even necessarily, like, actively, directly try to change the person's mind, but rather just sort of tries to get them to be more open minded and consider other evidence. Was that intentional or is that something that just sort of happened?
- [11:58]
Thomas Costello
The alien case is really interesting because that's actually not quite a conspiracy. I mean, I guess I believe that. I believe that aliens are out there somewhere in the vastness of the universe. They're just very far away from us. And we did look at instances where people said things that were in fact explicitly true. So things that have been verified and indeed occurred, and those people didn't change their minds at the end of the conversation. And the model usually said something like, you're right, that is something that happens. And the alien case. So it might be kind of on the bubble of that or right on the line.
- [12:30]
Claire Duffy
Yeah, it sort of pushes back on this idea that the government knows about aliens. It offers evidence contradicting that. But then it does say, like, there's a lot more research to do and maybe there's aliens out there somewhere. And it's this really kind of beautiful conversation that encourages curiosity.
- [12:45]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Right.
- [12:46]
Thomas Costello
Broadly. If you go one level up from our particular experiment to what people interacting with these tools and models looks like at a Societal level, encouraging curiosity and open mindedness seems like a really positive good outcome. There are lots of very scary bad things that we can imagine happening as people embrace AI. But curiosity and greater access to information is at least one positive thing.
- [13:09]
Claire Duffy
So you found that at least in some cases, the AI did actually convince some people to change their minds. Do you have a sense of like what percentage of people altered their beliefs?
- [13:20]
Thomas Costello
Yeah, we can look at it in terms of the average effect. The average amount of change that was visible in the experiments and that number is about 20%. So if you start at on a scale of zero, not at all believing to 100, totally believing and you're at 100, you'd go down to 80. If you're at 80, maybe you'd go down to 67 or something like that. On average, people went down by about 20% and one in four people became skeptical towards the conspiracy.
- [13:47]
Claire Duffy
Did you find that some types of conspiracy theories were easier for the AI to debunk than others?
- [13:53]
Thomas Costello
Yeah, that's a little tricky to interpret because it's not clear whether that's more about the kinds of people who believe certain conspiracies. So we had conspiracies about election fraud in 2020 in the U.S. presidential election and we saw a significant effect on average. But there were a lot more people who didn't change their minds or who only had very small belief change. And we can contrast that with the aliens example. Actually like the government is hiding aliens or JFK or 911 was another one where people moved quite a lot. The effects were actually bigger than that 20% average. So there was visible difference across the different conspiracy theories. But at the same time, I think further research is needed.
- [14:35]
Claire Duffy
Yeah, it does strike me that some of those beliefs are sort of more connected to people's identities. Like the election fraud seems to be very sort of like an identity marker that people take on. Whereas maybe aliens is not so much like that. Why is AI so good at this in a way that like maybe if somebody is trying to convince their uncle at the Thanksgiving table that birds are actually real is not so good at this.
- [15:03]
Thomas Costello
I think a lot of the active ingredient are what makes this work so well is that the AI is acting as a really effective search tool. Essentially there is so much information out there in the world, a lot of it is even information related to conspiracy theories is true in a superficial way. So it is true that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel beams as just like a factual claim out of context. That is true. What the AI model can do. If someone brings that in and says, hey, I think that I know that this is a fact, what's going on with this, it can provide the exact context that they need. So it can say, well, it doesn't melt, but it weakens. And here's why that's important. And there are lots of other examples of that. Conspiracy beliefs are fundamentally descriptive claims. They are saying that something happened and we are inundated in information in the Internet age. And so what the AI model can do is almost like compress or condense down just to the stuff that people need and provide it to them without having to search for it. And then the other angle here is that a lot of arguments, especially when it comes to socially politically loaded topics like conspiracy theories, a lot of arguments are almost proxy battles. You're a stand in for your group or your ideological cohort. And so giving ground is seen as almost like a loss of ideological status in a way. But when it's an AI, you're not playing with those stakes because you're not talking to another human being who's going to judge you or is going to in any way spread the news that you lost. Although of course, if you're in a research study, we are literally doing that. But with an AI, it's a more personal interaction. It's about you and it's about the information.
- [16:44]
Claire Duffy
So AI helps us get to the facts of the matter without the human element of an emotional debate or the slog through countless Google results. But what if the bot gets it wrong? That's after the break.
- [17:07]
Thomas Costello
It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I spent the past four years investigating a crime.
- [17:13]
Claire Duffy
When you're driving down this road, all.
- [17:15]
Thomas Costello
Right, plan on killing somebody. A four year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the US Military has kept from the public for years. Did you think that a war crime had been committed?
- [17:32]
Donie O'Sullivan
I don't have any opinion on that.
- [17:34]
Thomas Costello
Season three of in the Dark is available now. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:42]
Claire Duffy
I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. This week on the podcast Terms of Service, we're going deep on conspiracy theories. Could AI chatbots really be a helpful tool for pushing back on these false narratives? To find out, I spoke with Thomas Costello, an assistant professor of psychology at American University.
- [18:00]
Thomas Costello
It was not so much the AI part, but whether facts and evidence might work to change conspiracy believers mind to make them more skeptical.
- [18:08]
Claire Duffy
Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:12]
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- [19:23]
Claire Duffy
We know that AI can sometimes hallucinate. Sometimes it just makes things up. Is there a risk in these kinds of interactions of replacing somebody's conspiracy theory beliefs with some other false information?
- [19:35]
Thomas Costello
Yes, that is a risk. We hired a fact checker to go through a random sample of the conversations in the study and fact check each claim that the AI made. And we found that of the subset, virtually all of the claims were true. So I think we looked at 120 and 119 were rated as true and 1 was rated as misleading and 0 were rated as false. And this fact checker also looked at political bias and did not find any evidence of political bias in the set of conspiracies. That is not to say that in the whole group of conversations there aren't any hallucinations. There must be. And also more broadly, it's not to say that these models don't have problems related to hallucinations. And so if you wanted to stand this up as a genuine tool for people to use, you would want to have a check against that.
- [20:24]
Claire Duffy
One of the things I also found really heartening reading through the conversations and this sort of gets to your point, you know, this is just a good search tool is how many of the participants asked for the AI sources, you know, present this information and then the next exchange they would say, okay, that's really interesting. What are your sources? That seemed like a really good sign to me.
- [20:45]
Thomas Costello
Yeah, I think so, yeah. If you're going to do the fact checking yourself when you're talking to a model, it means you're both open to what they're saying as a possibility and you're not super credulous and just taking it because they're an AI and you trust them because they're objective or something like that. Ostensibly, and that's what we would want people to do in society generally is to, if you get information, cross reference it, see if it's actually true, ask for the source.
- [21:11]
Claire Duffy
So this was an experiment in the real world. How would you get people to engage with an AI chatbot about a conspiracy theory they believe in in the first place? Like, do you see this becoming a real tool?
- [21:24]
Thomas Costello
I see something like it becoming a real tool, whether it's being integrated into web browsers or search engines and things like that, or a standalone tool that people seek out. I think for political conspiracies, people are probably not going to be super motivated to check their work, as it were. But for other kinds of conspiracy theories, things like 911 truthers or aliens or JFK or new ones that crop up in the coming years, if this is a tool that gives you access to information, especially a tool that is controllable, you can tell it what you want to know about. Maybe that's something that's appealing. I'm excited to see what people do with the findings now that we've put them out there.
- [22:04]
Claire Duffy
We know that lots of people distrust artificial intelligence. Do you think it's going to be tricky to get people to trust AI when it's telling them they're wrong about such a deeply held belief?
- [22:16]
Thomas Costello
What we found in the data is that if you didn't trust AI in the first place, coming into the conversation, you didn't update your beliefs quite as much, but you still did a little bit. The displays of credibility are going to be important. So past experience with AI models where they provide people with correct information over and over again, presumably will factor in when people are then exposed to a fact or an interpretation that they don't like. So you'll do this calculus in your head of every other time I've asked the AI, it's been right, maybe, or it's only been wrong in the small number of instances. And so what are the chances that it's also wrong in this instance?
- [22:52]
Claire Duffy
Do you think that this technology eventually has the potential to meaningfully reverse the spread of conspiracy theories which we know have created so much division in our country, in families who are dealing with this right now, do you think that there are major implications for these findings?
- [23:09]
Thomas Costello
I think it gives us insight into how to change conspiracy beliefs and maybe even where they come from. But you'll need a larger effort or set of processes to really reverse the tide of whatever you want to call it, misinformation, conspiracy beliefs, some of which would need to happen at the source. As people are being schooled and educated, you know, in adolescence and in childhood, we need to teach them how to think critically and evaluate information in an objective, rational manner. It's also partially an issue of societal trust and institutional trust. And I think what we've found is that AI offers a tool to help solve it, and it's almost like treating an acute symptom of something rather than the underlying cause. And so I don't think AI will resolve it, but I do think it will democratize access to information and especially to rational information. And that seems like a positive thing to me. But I guess we'll see in the next couple of years.
- [24:01]
Claire Duffy
What's next for this research? What outstanding questions do you have about the ways that people can engage with this technology?
- [24:10]
Thomas Costello
I want to see if it works for all kinds of beliefs, not just conspiracies. So you know, everything from health information to people's brand preferences or prejudices, all kinds of things. And I just like to mention, because there's like, an almost dystopian bent to this. I think one of the key features of this AI persuasion, at least as we're using it, is that it is all based on facts and evidence and is not really in any way coercive. We're basically providing people with information and more context rather than pressuring them to change their beliefs in a meaningful way.
- [24:45]
Claire Duffy
Okay, so it sounds like there is more work to be done to figure out how these findings will manifest in the real world. But are there practical takeaways for listeners now? Like, if you believe in a conspiracy theory, should you consider chatting with a chatbot?
- [24:59]
Thomas Costello
Yeah, absolutely. One of the nice things about these chatbots is that they can expose you to information that you might not come across otherwise. As I've kind of said, it's a really efficient way of searching the sea of true and false things that are out there to find the very facts and precise pieces of information that you care about. So you can try out our experiment for yourself at this website we've set up for people to test it, called debunkbot.com or you can just ask ChatGPT to try to change your mind about something it might not do quite as good a job because it is rewarded and trained to be agreeable. And so it may not want to argue with you unless you really try to get it to do that. But I think this is a good way to test your beliefs, which is good epistemic hygiene. It's almost like you brush your teeth twice a day and when you come across a new fact that might or might not be true, you should go check it out. You can talk to a bot about it, you can Google search, whatever. But functionally, what these do is they lower the barrier to that sort of practice. It's easier to talk to a bot about something than it is to dig through a bunch of Google search results, you know, basically saving yourself the cognitive labor by talking to an AI about it.
- [26:06]
Claire Duffy
Got it. Yeah. Like kind of a helpful search partner.
- [26:08]
Thomas Costello
Yeah.
- [26:09]
Claire Duffy
Awesome. Well, Tom, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time.
- [26:12]
Thomas Costello
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.
- [26:16]
Claire Duffy
So, to recap, here are three tips that can help you and your loved ones navigate the ocean of information and misinformation out there and find out what's true. First, if you're unsure about a story that feels like a conspiracy belief, test it out@medunkbot.com you can ask if it has any credibility and get some context to understand the facts. Next, if you expect to be the devil's advocate to your consent conspiracy believing family member this Thanksgiving, you can use the Debunk bot as an argument coach. Input the argument you anticipate and ask for the evidence that rebuts it. Finally, and this may be a lot to ask, but I'd especially encourage you to do this before sharing information on social media that feels shocking or otherwise questionable. Slowing the spread of false claims online can help us all have a better grip on reality. Thanks again for listening to this episode of Terms of Service. If you try out the debunk bot for yourself, let me know how it goes. Send us an email@cnntermsofservicemail.com I'm Claire Duffy. Talk to you next week. Terms of Service is a CNN Audio and Goat Rodeo production. This show is produced and hosted by me, Claire Duffy at Goat Rodeo. The lead producer is Rebecca Seidel and the executive producers are Megan Nadolsky and Ian Enright. Production support on this episode from Jay Venables at cnn. Hayley Thomas is our senior producer and Dan Dezzulla is our technical director. Steve Lichtie is the executive producer of CNN Audio with support from Emily Williams, Taylor Phillips, David Rind, Dan Bloom, Robert Mathers, James Andrus, Nicole Pesaru, Alex Manasseri, Lainey Steinhardt, John Deonora and Lisa Namorow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman and Wendy Brundage. Thank you for listening.
- [28:26]
Sleep Number Advertiser
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- [29:02]
Claire Duffy
CNN Underscored's got you covered with the top Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals so you can shop smarter, not harder. See all our expert recommendations at Underscored.