I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Tom Costello, one of the authors of the paper that showed that LLMs are great at changing the beliefs of conspiracy theorists.
- I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Tom Costello, one of the authors of the paper that showed that LLMs are great at changing the beliefs of conspiracy theorists.
- Previously everyone assumed that conspiracy theorists were inherently hard to convince.
- It turns out that it's just hard to make arguments that convince them.
- Conspiracy theorists have an obsessive focus on a particular area.
- The desire to believe the conspiracy theory is more acute than the desire to not believe it, which is more diffuse.
- They know more "facts" about their obsession than you do.
- You'd need vast stores of concrete relevant information, and also infinite patience to customize the argument to them.[lj]
- Something that LLMs can do well!
- In their research they found that the effects of convincing were durable.
- They did some follow up research on the mechanism.
- They varied eight different dimensions that might have made the LLM more convincing.
- The only one that had an impact was the LLM's command of a vast set of facts.
- They also investigated if LLMs would be equally effective at convincing people of conspiracy theories.
- They found that if they allowed them to lie they were able to be similarly persuasive on average.
- Another argument for why alignment with a user's interests is so key.