LLMs Will Plausibly make people Less Conspiratorial
I have known a lot of conspiracy theorists. I spent much of my teens in the American homeschooling subculture, which exposes one to the lunatic fringe of evangelical conservatism.1 I encountered some vanilla conspiracies which hardly register as weird to me anymore. The 2020 election was apparently stolen, vaccines gave all of us the autism.2 Jet fuel, I was oft assured, cannot melt steel beams. But a lot of it was more recherché. FDR bombed Pearl Harbor. The Earth might be flat. Jews were agents of Ialdabaoth, Joe Biden personally ate children.
Ask yourself: how does a person come to believe that Joe Biden eats children? Sure, some people have psychosis, but most conspiracy theorists are perfectly sane. Usually, they just have a bad media diet. They get used to believing random people on YouTube or Instagram, and then the algorithm feeds them stuff which is progressively unmoored from reality. But, if a person gets a lot of their information from LLMs, they're liable to ask LLMs about dopey stuff they see on the internet. And, politically speaking, LLMs are apparently liberal centrists.3 Say what you will about Matthew Yglesias, but I doubt he thinks Joe Biden eats children.
Sure, the robots often tell you what you want to hear, but are they that sycophantic? I think that GPT-4o was -- for giggles, I once convinced GPT-4o that I was the reincarnation of Elijah, sent to prosecute a Jihad against coffee makers. But my sense is that AI companies realized this was very bad, so they tamped down on it a lot. GPT-5 did not behave this way, none of the Claudes I've used do. They do make mistakes, but their mistakes don't systematically favor the user's preferred brand of insanity. They won't give us epistemic perfection, but we might get an improvement.
My own family, thankfully, was not on the lunatic fringe, and I feel the need to specify that.↩
Homeschooled children are disproportionately autistic. This is the because the sort of people who think homeschooling is a good idea are disproportionately autistic. And they often have sex. This effect feels more pronounced than it is -- congenital social isolation resembles autism to the untrained eye.↩
This is not apparent to me, but my main AI use cases are "help me study X," "is this fact I vaguely remember true?" "why do neurotypical people behave in this way?" and "Why is the Braum's in Mustang, Oklahoma so uniquely dysfunctional?" To its credit, Claude apparently denies that Joe Biden eats children.↩