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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. This means that while presenting certain bits of factual evidence may work on one believer, there’s no guarantee that it’ll prove effective on another.
That’s where AI models come in, he says. “They have access to a ton of information across diverse topics, and they’ve been trained on the internet. Because of that, they have the ability to tailor factual counterarguments to particular conspiracy theories that people believe.”