There's a new war on social media conspiracy theories

conspiracy theories about everything from the assassination of John F Kennedy to what really happened on January 6th persistent in politics and Beyond but now new Tech May Point toward a potential breakthrough meet debunk bot powered by open Ai and created by researchers at MIT Cornell and American who say it can help reduce people's beliefs in conspiracies significantly so let's go in that direction we tried it out with one of the brains behind the bot Thomas Castello with a conspiracy that Decades of debunking hasn't eradicated that's one small step for man I believe the moon landing

is not real right I don't believe that I don't actually believe that the bot asks us to elaborate on the belief why is the flag waving and to rate how strongly we feel about it I'm going to say 99% true then in a series of screens the chatbot presents facts lots of them how can you be sure that what it's telling me here is accurate so absolutely we found that it tends to be quite accurate we hired a professional fact Checker to go through some of the conversations in our study a subset and in 99.2%

of uh cases that that we looked at the fact Checker rated the AI claims as true at the end we reassess how strongly we feel about the belief now and it's here where researchers found something that surprised them yeah on average people reduced their belief by about 20% and consistent across a wide range of conspiracies on topics from Princess Diana to vaccinations they found one in four participants disavowed the belief altogether I think if you gave the facts to a semi-competent lawyer the lawyer would make a much more persuasive case than the AI does it's

it's just that the lawyer has to do all would have to do all this background reason uh or research and the AI can conjure it up in you know 12 seconds but in reality getting folks to engage at all could be tough what makes you think that somebody who believes in a conspiracy theory is going to go on here and type it in so that their minds can be changed yeah well so I I would say that a lot of conspiracy theorists end up being motivated by by truth and accuracy going to to a chatbot

interface that provides factual information uh seems like a good way to do that to me like most technology it can cut both ways you could imagine a version of this that spreads conspiracy theories the debunk bot team now working on refining the tech hoping it helps shine a light down consp oratorial rabbit holes we can uh use facts to open up the top of the rabbit hole to um begin to crawl out a belief worth further research hiy Jackson NBC News Washington thanks for watching stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC

News app or follow us on social media