Study: brief chatbot chats cut conspiracy beliefs better than fact sheets

Researchers ran two experiments testing whether a roughly seven-minute conversation with Google's Gemini chatbot could reduce belief in conspiracy theories about current events. The chatbot outperformed a static fact sheet, and follow-up surveys weeks later found the effect persisted and even generalized to beliefs about unrelated events.

Why it matters: This adds to growing evidence that conversational AI can be a more effective debunking tool than static information because it responds directly to a person's specific doubts and reasoning. It points to both an opportunity (AI-assisted public health or civic literacy tools) and a risk, since the same persuasive mechanism could entrench false beliefs if a model were tuned differently.