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2025-10-30 21:10:00

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Introducing: the new conspiracy age

Everything is a conspiracy theory now. Conspiracists are all over the White House, turning fringe ideas into dangerous policy. America’s institutions are crumbling under the weight of deep suspicion and the lasting effects of covid isolation. Online echo chambers are getting harder to escape, and generative AI is altering the fabric of truth. A mix of technology and politics has given an unprecedented boost to once-fringe ideas—but they are pretty much the same fantasies that have been spreading for hundreds of years.

MIT Technology Review helps break down how this moment is changing science and technology—and how we can make it through. We’re thrilled to present The New Conspiracy Age, a new series digging into how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. 

To kick us off, check out Dorian Lynskey’s fascinating piece explaining why it’s never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist. And stay tuned—we’ll be showcasing a different story from the package each day in the next few editions of The Download!

Four thoughts from Bill Gates on climate tech

Bill Gates doesn’t shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. “Well, who’s the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?” he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. “If there’s someone else, I’ve never met them.”

The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he’s thinking about the state of climate tech right now. Here’s what he had to say.

—Casey Crownhart

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 US Homeland Security shared false videos of immigration operations
They claimed to show recent operations but used footage that was old, or recorded thousands of miles away. (WP $)
+ ICE is scanning pedestrians’ faces to verify their citizenship. (404 Media)

2 Character.AI is banning under-18s from talking to its virtual companions
It’s currently facing several lawsuits from families who claim its chatbots have harmed their children. (NYT $)
+ The company says it’s introducing age assurance functionality. (FT $)
+ Teenage boys are using chatbots to roleplay as girlfriends. (The Guardian)
+ The looming crackdown on AI companionship. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Trump directed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing
America hasn’t conducted such tests for more than 30 years. (BBC)
+ The US President made multiple incorrect assertions in his statement. (The Verge)
+ He doesn’t seem to even know why he wants to resume the tests himself. (The Atlantic $)

4 A Google DeepMind AI model accurately predicted Hurricane Melissa’s severity
It’s the first time the US National Hurricane Center has deployed it. (Nature $)
+ Here’s how to actually help the people affected by its extensive damage. (Vox)
+ Google DeepMind’s new AI model is the best yet at weather forecasting. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A major record label has signed a deal with AI music firm Udio
Universal Music Group had previously sued it for copyright infringement. (WSJ $)
+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Are companies using AI as a fig leaf to lay workers off?
It’s sure starting to look that way. (NBC News)
+ Big Tech is going to keep spending billions on AI, regardless. (WP $)

7 Meta Ray-Ban users are filming themselves in massage parlors
They’re harassing workers, who appear unaware they’re being recorded. (404 Media)
+ China’s smart glasses makers are keen to capture the market. (FT $)

8 Just three countries dominate the world’s space launches
What will it take to get some other nations in the mix? (Rest of World)

9 Why you shouldn’t hire an AI agent
Their freelancing capabilities are… limited. (Wired $)
+ The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI. (MIT Technology Review)

10 This app’s AI-generated podcasting dog videos are a big hit
But DogPack wants to make sure viewers know it’s not trying to trick them. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“Zuck spent five years and $70 billion dollars to build a business that loses $4.4 billion/year to create only $470 million in revenue. So bad you can’t give it away, I guess.”

—Greg Linden, a former data scientist at Microsoft, pokes fun at Meta’s beleaguered Reality Labs’ earnings in a post on Bluesky.

One more thing

How scientists want to make you young again

A little over 15 years ago, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan made a remarkable discovery. When they added just four proteins to a skin cell and waited about two weeks, some of the cells underwent an unexpected and astounding transformation: they became young again. They turned into stem cells almost identical to the kind found in a days-old embryo, just beginning life’s journey.

At least in a petri dish, researchers using the procedure can take withered skin cells from a 101-year-old and rewind them so they act as if they’d never aged at all.

Now, after more than a decade of studying and tweaking so-called cellular reprogramming, a number of biotech companies and research labs say they have tantalizing hints that the process could be the gateway to an unprecedented new technology for age reversal. Read the full story. 

—Antonio Regalado

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ 2025’s Comedy Wildlife Award winners and finalists are classics of the genre.
+ This Instagram account shared the same video of Thomas the Tank Engine’s daring railway stunts every day, and I think that’s just beautiful.
+ How to get more of that elusive deep sleep.
+ Here’s an interesting take on why we still find dragons so fascinating

2025-10-30 20:00:00

2025-10-30 19:00:00

Bill Gates doesn’t shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. “Well, who’s the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?” he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. “If there’s someone else, I’ve never met them.”

The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he’s thinking about the state of climate tech right now. Let’s get into it. 

Are we too focused on near-term climate goals?

One of the central points Gates made in his new memo is that he thinks the world is too focused on near-term emissions goals and national emissions reporting.

So in parallel with the national accounting structure for emissions, Gates argues, we should have high-level climate discussions at events like the UN climate conference. Those discussions should take a global view on how to reduce emissions in key sectors like energy and heavy industry.

“The way everybody makes steel, it’s the same. The way everybody makes cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same,” he says.

As he noted in one recent essay for MIT Technology Review, he sees innovation as the key to cutting the cost of clean versions of energy, cement, vehicles, and so on. And once products get cheaper, they can see wider adoption.

What’s most likely to power our grid in the future?

“In the long run, probably either fission or fusion will be the cheapest way to make electricity,” he says. (It should be noted that, as with most climate technologies, Gates has investments in both fission and fusion companies through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, so he has a vested interest here.)

He acknowledges, though, that reactors likely won’t come online quickly enough to meet rising electricity demand in the US: “I wish I could deliver nuclear fusion, like, three years earlier than I can.”

He also spoke to China’s leadership in both nuclear fission and fusion energy. “The amount of money they’re putting [into] fusion is more than the rest of the world put together times two. I mean, it’s not guaranteed to work. But name your favorite fusion approach here in the US—there’s a Chinese project.”

Can carbon removal be part of the solution?

I had my colleague James Temple’s recent story on what’s next for carbon removal at the top of my mind, so I asked Gates if he saw carbon credits or carbon removal as part of the problematic near-term thinking he wrote about in the memo.

Gates buys offsets to cancel out his own personal emissions, to the tune of about $9 million a year, he said at the roundtable, but doesn’t expect many of those offsets to make a significant dent in climate progress on a broader scale: “That stuff, most of those technologies, are a complete dead end. They don’t get you cheap enough to be meaningful.

“Carbon sequestration at $400, $200, $100, can never be a meaningful part of this game. If you have a technology that starts at $400 and can get to $4, then hallelujah, let’s go. I haven’t seen that one. There are some now that look like they can get to $40 or $50, and that can play somewhat of a role.”

 Will AI be good news for innovation? 

During the discussion, I started a tally in the corner of my notebook, adding a tick every time Gates mentioned AI. Over the course of about an hour, I got to six tally marks, and I definitely missed making a few.

Gates acknowledged that AI is going to add electricity demand, a challenge for a US grid that hasn’t seen net demand go up for decades. But so too will electric cars and heat pumps. 

I was surprised at just how positively he spoke about AI’s potential, though:

“AI will accelerate every innovation pipeline you can name: cancer, Alzheimer’s, catalysts in material science, you name it. And we’re all trying to figure out what that means. That is the biggest change agent in the world today, moving at a pace that is very, very rapid … every breakthrough energy company will be able to move faster because of using those tools, some very dramatically.”

I’ll add that, as I’ve noted here before, I’m skeptical of big claims about AI’s potential to be a silver bullet across industries, including climate tech. (If you missed it, check out this story about AI and the grid from earlier this year.) 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

2025-10-30 18:00:00

On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn’t do a thing about what they were hearing.

After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena’s Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning. Its residents spent the night making frantic, desperate scrambles to grab whatever they could and get to safety. 

In the aftermath, many claimed that they received no warning to evacuate, saw no first responders battling the blazes, and had little interaction with official personnel. Most were simply left to fend for themselves. 

Making matters worse, while no place is “good” for a wildfire, Altadena was especially vulnerable. It was densely packed with 100-year-old wooden homes, many of which were decades behind on the code upgrades that would have better protected them. It was full of trees and other plants that had dried out during the rain-free winter. Few residents or officials were prepared for the seemingly remote possibility that the fires that often broke out in the mountains nearby would jump into town. As a result, resources were strained to the breaking point, and many homes simply burned freely.

So the people packed into the room that morning had a lot to be angry about. They unloaded their own personal ordeals, the traumas their community had experienced, and even catastrophes they’d heard about secondhand. Each was like a dagger to the heart, met with head-nods and “uh-huhs” from people all going through the same thing.

Two trains collide

It’s something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. Think of the deluge of “false flag” and “staged gun grab” conspiracy theories after mass shootings, or the rampant disinformation around covid-19 and the 2020 election. It’s often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what “really” caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones, with both sides battling it out on social media and TV. 

For a long time, I’d been able to talk about the conspiracy theories without letting them in. Now the disinformation was in the room with me, and it was about my life.

My house, a cottage built in 1925, was one of those that burned back in January. Our only official notification to flee had come at 3:25 a.m., nine hours after the fires started. We grabbed what we could in 10 minutes, I locked our front door, and six hours later, it was all gone. We could have died. Eighteen Altadena residents did die—and all but one were in the area that was warned too late.

Previously in my professional life, I’d always been able to look at the survivors of a tragedy, crying on TV about how they’d lost everything, and think sympathetically but distantly, Oh, those poor people. And soon enough, the conspiracy theories I was following about the incident for work would die down, and then it was no longer in my official purview—I could move on to the next disaster and whatever mess came with it. 

Now I was one of those poor people. The Eaton Fire had changed everything about my life. Would it change everything about my work as well? It felt as though two trains I’d managed to keep on parallel tracks had collided.

Just true enough

In the days following the Eaton Fire, which coincided with another devastating fire in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the Biden plane storyline was just one of countless rumors, false claims, hoaxes, and accusations about what had happened and who was behind them.

Most were culture-war nonsense or political fodder. I also saw clearly fake AI slop (no, the Hollywood sign was not on fire) and bits of TikTok ephemera that could largely be ignored. 

They were from something like an alternate world, one where forest floors hadn’t been “raked” and where incompetent “DEI firefighters” let houses burn while water waited in a giant spigot that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, refused to “turn on” because he preferred to protect an endangered fish. There were claims that the fires were set on purpose to clear land for the Olympics, or to cover up evidence of human trafficking. Rumors flew that LA had donated all its firefighting money and gear to Ukraine. Some speculated that the fires were started by undocumented immigrants (one was suspected of causing one of the fires but never charged) or “antifa” or Black Lives Matter activists—never mind that one of the most demographically Black areas in the city was wiped out. Or, as always, it was the Jews. In this case, blame fell on a “wealthy Jewish couple” who supposedly owned most of LA’s water and wouldn’t let it go.

These claims originated from the same “just asking questions” influencers who run the same playbook for every disaster. And they spread rapidly through X, a platform where breaking news had been drowned out by hysterical conspiracism. 

According to fact-checking by both USA Today and Reuters, Biden flew into Los Angeles the day before the Eaton Fire broke out (which was also the same day that the Palisades Fire started, roughly 30 miles to the west), to dedicate two new national monuments. He left two days later. And while there were security measures in place, including flight restrictions over the area where he was staying, firefighting planes simply had to coordinate with air traffic controllers to cross into the closed-off space. 

But when my sort-of neighbor brought up this particular theory that day in May, I wasn’t able to debunk it. For one thing, this was my first time hearing the rumor. But more than that, what could I say that would assuage this man’s anger? And if he wanted to blame Biden for his house burning down, was it really my place to tell him he was wrong—even if he was? 

It’s common for survivors of a disaster to be aware of only parts of the story, struggle to understand the full picture, or fail to fully recollect what happened to them in the moment of survival. Once the trauma ebbs, we’re left looking for answers and clarity and someone who knows what’s going on, because we certainly don’t have a clue. Hoaxes and misinformation stem from anger, confusion, and a lack of clear answers to rapidly evolving questions.  

I can confirm that it was dizzying. Rumors and hoaxes were going around in my personal circles too, even if they weren’t so lurid and even if we didn’t really believe them. Bits of half-heard news circulated constantly in our group texts, WhatsApp chains, Facebook groups, and in-person gatherings. 

There was confusion over who was responsible for the extent of the devastation, genuine anger about purported LA Fire Department budget cuts (though those had not actually happened to the extent conspiracists claimed they did), and fears that a Trump-controlled federal government would abandon California. 

Many of the homes and businesses that we heard had burned down hadn’t, and others that we heard had survived were gone. In an especially heartbreaking early bit of misinformation, a local child-care facility shared a Facebook post stating that FEMA was handing out vouchers to pay 90% of your rent for the next three years—except FEMA doesn’t hand out rent vouchers without an application process. I quietly reached out to the source, who took it down. 

In this information vacuum, and given my work, friends started asking me questions, and answering them took energy and time I didn’t have. Honestly, the “disinformation researcher” was largely just as clueless as everyone else. 

Some of the questions were harmless enough. At one point a friend texted me about a picture from Facebook of a burned Bible page that survived the fire when everything else had turned to ash. It looked too corny and convenient to be real. But I had also found a burned page of Psalms that had survived. I kept it in a ziplock bag because it seemed like the right thing to do. So I told my friend I didn’t know if it was real. I still don’t—but I also still have that ziplock somewhere.

Under attack

As weeks passed, we began to deal with another major issue where truth and misinformation walked together: the reasonable worry that a new president who constantly belittled California would not be willing to provide relief funds. 

Recovery depended on FEMA to distribute grants, on the EPA to clear toxic debris, on the Small Business Administration to make loans for rebuilding or repairing homes, on the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the detritus of burned structures, and so much more. How would this square with the new “government efficiency” mandate touting the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to be cut from the federal budget? 

Nobody knew—including the many kind government employees who spent months in Altadena helping us recover while silently wondering if they were about to be fired.

We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us.

Many residents of Altadena began to have trepidation about accepting government assistance, particularly in its Black community, which already had a well-earned deep distrust of the federal government. Many Black residents felt that their needs and stories were being left behind in the recovery, and feared they would be the first to be priced out of whatever Altadena would become in the future.

Outreach in person became critical. I happened to meet the two-star general in charge of the Army Corps’ effort at lunch one day, as he and his team tried to find outside-the-box ways to engage with exhausted and wary residents. He told me they had tried to use technology—texts, emails, clips designed to go viral—but it was too much information, all apparently delivered in the wrong way. Many of the people they needed to reach, particularly older residents, didn’t use social media, weren’t able to communicate well via text, and were easy prey for sophisticated scammers. It was also easy for the real information to get lost as we got bombarded with communications, including many from hoaxers and frauds.

This, too, wasn’t new to me. Many of the movements I’ve covered are awash in grift and worthless wellness products. I know the signs of a scam and a snake-oil salesman. Still, I watched helplessly as my friends and my community, desperate for help, were turned into chum for cash-hungry sharks opening their jaws wide. 

The community was hammered by dodgy contractors and fly-by-night debris removal companies, relief scams and phony grants, and spam calls from “repair companies” and builders. We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. We were also victimized by looting: Abandoned wires on our lot were stripped for copper, and our neighbor’s unlocked garage was ransacked. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us.

The fear of being conned was easily transmittable, even to me personally. After hearing of friends who couldn’t get a FEMA grant because a previous owner of their home had fraudulently filed an application, we delayed our own appointment with FEMA for weeks. The agency’s call had come so out of the blue that we were convinced it was fake. Maybe my job made me overcautious, or maybe we were just paralyzed by the sheer tonnage of decisions and calls that needed to be handled. Whatever the reason, the fear meant we later had to make multiple calls just to get our meeting rescheduled. It’s a small thing, but when you’re as exhausted and dispirited as we were, there are no small things. 

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY IMAGES

Making all this even more frustrating was that the scammers, the people spinning tales of lasers and endangered fish and antifa, were very much ignoring the reality: that our planet is trying to kill us. While federal officials recently made an arrest in the Palisades Fire, the direct causes of that fire and the nearby Eaton Fire may still take years of investigation and litigation to be fully known. But even now, it can’t be denied to any reasonable degree that climate change worsened the wind that made the fires spread more quickly.

The Santa Ana winds bombarding Southern California were among the worst ever to hit the region. Their ferocity drove the embers well beyond the nominal fire danger line, particularly in Altadena. Many landed in brush left brittle and dead by the decades-long drought plaguing California. And they had even more fuel because the previous two winters had been among the wettest in the region’s recent history. Such rapid swings between wet and dry or cold and hot have become so common around the world that they even have a name: climate whiplash. 

There are the conspiracy theory gurus who see this and make money off it, peddling disinformation on their podcasts and livestreams, while blaming everyone and everything but the real reasons. Many of these figures have spent decades railing against the very idea that the climate could change. And if it is changing, they claimed, human consumption and urbanization have nothing to do with it. When faced with a disaster that undeniably reflected climate change at work, their business models—which rely on sales of subscriptions and merchandise—demanded that they just keep denying it was climate change at work.

As more cities and countries deal with “once in a century” climate disasters, I have no doubt that these figures will continue to deflect attention away from human activity. They will use crackpot science, conspiracy theories, politics, and—increasingly—fake videos depicting whatever AI can generate. They will prey on their audiences’ limited understanding of basic science, their inability to perceive how climate and weather differ, and their fears that globalist power brokers will somehow use the weather against them. And their message will spread with little pushback from social media platforms more concerned with virality and shareholder value than truth.

Resisting the temptation

When you cover disinformation and live through an event creating a massive volume of disinformation, it’s like floating outside your body on an operating table as your heart is being worked on, while also being a heart surgeon. I knew I should be trying to help. But I did not have the mental capacity, the time, or, to be honest, the interest in covering what the worst people on the internet were saying about the worst time of my life. I had very real questions about where my family would live. Thinking about my career was not a priority. 

But of course, these experiences cannot now be excised from my career. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how trauma influences conspiracism; see how the isolation and boredom of covid created a new generation of conspiracy theory believers. And now I had my own trauma, and it has been a test of my abilities as a journalist and a thinker to avoid falling into the pit of despair.

At the same time, I have a much deeper understanding of the psychology at work in conspiracy belief. One of the biggest reasons conspiracy theories take off after a disaster is that they serve to make sense out of something that makes no sense. Neighborhoods aren’t supposed to burn down in an era of highly trained firefighters and seemingly fireproof materials. They especially aren’t supposed to burn down in Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. These were seven- and eight-figure homes going up like matches. There must be a reason, people figured. Someone, or something, must be responsible.

So, as I emerge from the haze to something resembling “normal,” I feel more compassion and understanding for trauma victims who turn to conspiracy theories. Having faced the literal burning down of my life, I get the urge to assign meaning to such a calamity and point a finger at whoever we think did it to us. 

Meanwhile, the people of Altadena and Pacific Palisades continue to slowly put our lives and communities back together. The effects of both our warming planet and our disinformation crisis continue to assert themselves every day. It’s still alluring to look for easy answers in outrageous conspiracy theories, but such answers are not real and offer no actual help—only the illusion of help.

It’s equally tempting for someone who researches and debunks conspiracy theories to mock or belittle the people who believe these ideas. How could anyone be so dumb as to think Joe Biden caused the fire that burned down my home?

I kept my mouth shut that day at the meeting in the church, though, again, I can now sympathize much more deeply with something I’d otherwise think completely inane. 

But even a journalist who lost his house is still a journalist. So I decided early on that what I really needed to do was keep Altadena in the news. I went on TV and radio, blogged, and happily told our story to anyone who asked. I focused on the community, the impact, the people who would be working to recover long after the national spotlight moved to the next shiny object.

If there is a professional lesson to be taken from this nightmare, it might be that the people caught up in tragedies are exactly that: caught up. And those who believe this nonsense find something of value in it. They find hope and comfort and the reassurance that whoever did this to them will get what they deserve. 

I could have done it too, throwing away years of experience to embrace conspiracist nihilism in the face of unspeakable trauma. After all, those poor people going through this weren’t just on my TV. 

They were my friends. They were me. They could be anyone.

Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an expert on the growth and impact of conspiracy theories and disinformation. He has written three books, including The Storm Is Upon Us, about the QAnon conspiracy movement, and Jewish Space Lasers, about the myths around the Rothschild banking family. He also is a frequent expert witness in legal cases involving conspiracy theories and has spoken at colleges and conferences around the country. He lives in Southern California.

2025-10-30 18:00:00

There is a shirt currently listed on eBay for $2,128.79. It was not designed by Versace or Dior, nor spun from the world’s finest silk. In fact, a tag proudly declares, “100% cotton made in Myanmar”—but it’s a second tag, just below that one, that makes this blue button-down so expensive. 

Many of us have been wearing the casualwear company’s T-shirts and underpants for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a woven brown horn of plenty on the logo is surprisingly contentious. According to a 2022 poll by the research company YouGov, 55% of Americans believe the logo does include a cornucopia, 25% are unsure, and only 21% are confident that it doesn’t, even though this last group is correct. According to a 2023 post from the company, the Fruit of the Loom logo does not include—and, according to Snopes, has never included—a horn of plenty. (MIT Technology Review could not reach Fruit of the Loom for comment.)

Maybe you’ve come across this fact before, via an internet meme that made you gasp, shrug, or scratch your head. There’s a specific name for what’s happening here: Those who believe the logo used to include the cornucopia are experiencing the “Mandela effect,” or collective false memory, so called because a number of people misremember that Nelson Mandela died in prison. I helped popularize the phenomenon in a viral 2016 New Statesman article about a movie that doesn’t actually exist, and in the time since it’s become something of a household term; TV shows from Saturday Night Live to Black Mirror to The X-Files have explored the Mandela effect.

But whether you remember the brown horn, incorrectly recall Darth Vader saying, “Luke, I am your father,” or believe that a popular children’s book was spelled The Berenstein Bears, you’ve probably moved on with your life. Google searches for “Mandela effect” have plummeted from 2016 highs, and Hermann has had zero bids on the shirt she posted last year—even though, at least to her eyes, it features a cornucopia on the tag. “No one’s really offered anything, and no one’s said anything about it,” she says, “which to me is kind of crazy.” 

And yet while many find it easy to let their unconfirmable beliefs go, others have spent the better part of a decade seeking answers—and vindication. There are commonly more than 170,000 weekly visitors to a Mandela effect subreddit that sees over 1,000 comments on average every day. While a fair share of these commenters are skeptics, plenty more are dedicated believers who are not satisfied with the prevailing explanation that human memory is fallible and instead invest their time into bringing the truth—whatever exactly it may be—to light. 

“I’ve been a bit ostracized from my family ever since I started pushing this thing nine years ago,” says a 51-year-old Massachusetts-based Fruit of the Loom truther who asked to go by the name AJ Booras. “I’m not inclined to simply let this phenomenon fall by the proverbial wayside, even if I’m the last one standing.” 

Some online believe in a fairly straightforward conspiracy: They want Fruit of the Loom to confess that it’s “gaslighting” customers and used to have a cornucopia on its tags. Others speculate that the answer lies in quantum physics: If—as the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said—there’s “better than 50-50 odds” that we’re living in a simulation, then might there be some sort of glitch, lag, or failed software update that means some people see and remember the world differently from others?

“The scientific community isn’t really looking that hard at it—and if they are, they’re always framing it as a memory thing,” says AJ. “It’s a hard barrier to make any headway on.” This is why, AJ says, he’s become “addicted” to researching the phenomenon: “It’s a personal quest for vindication.” 

Will anyone ever believe these believers? There are two options for those who think the Fruit of the Loom logo once had a cornucopia: accept that your memory is wrong, or think that the world is. What makes some people happy with the simple explanation and others determined to seek the more complicated one? 

“The bridge between perception and memory” 

There’s nothing quite as disconcerting as when memory and reality conflict. After all, what is reality—or at least your reality—if not your memory? This is why it can be so satisfying to find concrete evidence that you are irrefutably correct: Here’s an old photo that proves Dad did come on the ’09 trip to Florida and your sister is foolish and wrong. 

In the Mandela effect community, evidence implying that the world used to be different is called “residue.” There is an abundant amount of residue suggesting that the Fruit of the Loom logo once had a cornucopia. 

In the 2006 animated film The Ant Bully, a pair of parodical “Fruit of the Loin” underwear is drawn with a cornucopia on the tag. A similar gag in a 2012 episode of South Park sees a fake clothing brand named “Cornucopia.” In 1973, when the jazz flutist Frank Wess released an album called Flute of the Loom, the cover showed fruit pouring out a cornucopia-shaped flute. When allegedly tracked down by Redditors, the illustrator reportedly said the clothing logo had inspired the design: “Why the hell else would I have used a cornucopia?” 

On top of that, numerous newspaper and magazine articles written from the 1970s to the early 2000s reference the horn of plenty, as does a short play first performed in 1968 and a novel, The Brothers K, published in 1992. New residue is still being discovered: In April 2025, a TikToker shared an old ’90s trivia game in which clues about brands are listed on cards. The card for Fruit of the Loom includes the words “underwear,” “apples and grapes,” and “cornucopia.” 

How can all these people—animators, illustrators, journalists, and writers—have made the same mistake? When I reached out to the author of The Brothers K, David James Duncan, he was adamant that there was no mistake: “My inspiration was the Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts I owned at the time,” he said via email. “I changed nothing in describing the boxers, and yes, they did have a Fruit of the Loom cornucopia on the label in the back of the shorts.” 

Conversely, when I spoke with Billy Cox, a journalist who referenced the cornucopia in a 1994 article in Florida Today, he was less confident. “I have no idea what fueled my initial assumption about the cornucopia. Zero. Zilch-o. Nada,” said Cox, also via email. But he’s prepared to admit that he may have been careless in his reporting: “Even if the internet had been available back then, I doubt I would’ve double-checked the logo’s history.”

It’s an interesting thought: Most of the articles referencing the cornucopia are from a period—the ’70s through the ’90s—when journalists wouldn’t have been able to quickly google the logo. But why would they all misremember it the exact same way? 

Wilma Bainbridge is an associate psychology professor at the University of Chicago who researches what she calls “the bridge between perception and memory”; she got her PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT in 2016. 

Bainbridge herself first came across the Mandela effect on social media—she was “wowed” when confronted with the true spelling of the Berenstain Bears in the famous American children’s books. In 2022, she published a scientific study on visual Mandela effects and ultimately found that there is consistency in what people misremember. “People’s memories are surprisingly predictable,” she says. 

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The husband-and-wife team of Stanley and Janice Berenstain wrote and illustrated the popular children’s books. More than 300 titles bear the family name.

In one experiment in the study, she found that people who aren’t very familiar with an image can share the same false memories as those who claim to be highly familiar. For example, some Mandela effect experiencers believe that the Monopoly man wore a monocle. In Bainbridge’s study, even people who didn’t know the character well sometimes drew the monocle when they were shown the Monopoly man and were later asked to draw him; this means the mistake was based on recall, not recognition, and could suggest that there’s something intrinsic to certain images that encourages memory errors. 

Scientists have long demonstrated that human memory is inherently fallible. In 1996, psychologists asked people whether they had watched news footage of the 1992 Bijlmer plane crash in Amsterdam, and more than 60% of the participants said yes—even though no recording of the crash exists. Other studies have shown that our memories can be corrupted by our peers and that false memories can be contagious. Arguably, the internet has caused memory contagion when it comes to the Mandela effect: Comparatively very few people googled “Fruit of the Loom cornucopia” between 2004 and 2017, with searches growing more common after a Redditor pointed out what was believed to be the first piece of “residue” in 2016 and (and again spiking dramatically when a TikTok video on the phenomenon was posted in 2023; it’s since earned over 5 million views). 

“Some people make things go viral because they want to believe it,” says Don, a 61-year-old American who has been moderating the Mandela effect subreddit since 2017. (He asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy.) “People want to be part of the experience.”

Still, Bainbridge’s study didn’t land on one definitive reason for the Mandela effect. “I was surprised to find there was no singular explanation,” she says. 

Using a method of monitoring cursor movement that’s analogous to eye-tracking technology, the academic tested whether people made memory errors because they didn’t pay attention to an image or looked at only certain parts of it. She found this wasn’t the case. 

Could it be, then, that people simply fill in the blanks of their memory with archetypes—we remember the Monopoly man with a monocle because we associate the eyepiece with rich old men? 

Bainbridge has found that this explanation—known as the “schema theory”—cannot fully explain the Mandela effect either. In one of her experiments, participants were asked to select the correct Fruit of the Loom logo from three images: one without a cornucopia, one with a cornucopia, and one with a plate. Even though we see fruit on plates far more often than we see it inside cornucopias, more participants selected the horn of plenty than the crockery. 

Bainbridge is drawn to the idea that some images simply cause more false memories than others. “We think the underlying cause will not likely be a single feature—e.g., attractiveness, color—but how these features work together in relation to things already stored in our memory,” she says. “But this work is still in its early stages, so we don’t know exactly what that combination is like.” 

Believers like AJ just aren’t convinced.

“In simulation, anything can happen”

“A lot of people remember looking at this unfamiliar object on their underwear tag,” says AJ, “and asking a parent, ‘Is that a loom?’ and the parents saying, ‘No! That’s what we call a cornucopia.’” 

When he was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, AJ wore Fruit of the Loom underwear and regularly folded laundry with his mother. “You stack up enough underwear, and you’re seeing that logo over and over and over again,” he says.

As a newly fledged adult around the late ’90s, AJ had to go to the store and buy his own underwear for the first time. “I noticed,” he says, “that the logo had changed, and it was just a pile of fruit.” 

Unperturbed, AJ assumed the company had just rebranded—he didn’t worry about it too much until almost two decades later, when he came across the Mandela effect online and realized the consensus was that there had never been a cornucopia. “We call it the wave of 2016 in the Mandela effect community—it was this huge rush of many, many effects that were being noticed,” he says. 

The first time he heard about the Mandela effect, AJ says, he “actually swooned” because of an “overwhelming existential dread that something was dreadfully wrong with reality itself.” 

Today, AJ believes in numerous instances of the Mandela effect, all of which have been shown to be incorrect but nonetheless have robust believer communities online: that the pizza roll brand used to be called Tostino’s, not Totino’s; that the location of Australia has moved on the world map; that the show Sex and the City was Sex in the City; Froot Loops cereal was formerly Fruit Loops; human organs have shifted positions; the sun changed color from yellow to white …

For him, each is just one part of a larger problem he can’t explain about the universe. At first, AJ says, he sought answers by researching memory science and psychology, but he was left unsatisfied. So instead, he looked to quantum mechanics and metaphysics, specifically ontology—the study of reality. 

In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom—famous for his theories on the threat of AI “superintelligence”—posited that humanity may be living inside a simulation. Almost two decades later, the astronomer David Kipping performed some calculations and put the odds at 50-50. “In simulation, anything can happen,” AJ says. “You could have different servers—one server hasn’t been updated, some people are seeing one version, some people are seeing the other.” It is also possible, AJ argues, that we exist in a multiverse—an idea first floated by the physicist Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. If people are somehow traveling between these parallel universes, then they may have memories from different worlds. Both of these theories are recurrent in the Mandela effect community online.  

And yet AJ doesn’t find these explanations entirely fulfilling: “If we jumped universes, why would there be residue?” Instead, he’s been diving into a combination of the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP)—which suggests, controversially, that the act of observation creates reality—and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s “friend” experiment, which theorized that two observers can experience two different realities. AJ believes that physicists’ own work may be affecting the universe: “It’s almost like you’re changing the parameters of reality itself by digging deeper.” 

There is still so much that the experts themselves can’t explain about quantum physics, so it’s no wonder that laypeople get confused. The internet offers myriad rabbit holes to go down, some of them legitimate and some of them less so. Things are complicated further when YouTubers and internet commenters who aren’t well versed in the science take specific, highly complex theories and experiments and try to apply them to other phenomena, even if there is no concrete evidence they’re related. So I set about emailing physicists, simply to see whether they believe it might be remotely possible that quantum physics could, in fact, explain the Mandela effect.

Numerous academics replied telling me they had nothing to say on the topic; Bostrom’s office said he was unavailable. I asked the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli—who has been labelled one of the world’s 50 top thinkers—whether he has any thoughts about Mandela effect believers’ quantum-physics-related theories. “Yes, definitely,” he replied. “They are all total bullshit! There are few things about which I am totally convinced. This is one.” 

I contacted the University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch—often called the “father of quantum computing”—and listed the theories believers think may explain the Mandela effect, including parallel universes, simulations, the holographic principle, PAP, and Wigner’s friend idea. “Considered as explanations of the Mandela effect, none of those follow from quantum theory, and none of them constitute a rational speculation beyond it,” he said. Johns Hopkins University professor and physicist Sean M. Carroll concurs: “I cannot imagine how any of those phenomena could be in any way related to the Mandela effect.” 

Melvin Vopson, an associate professor of physics at the University of Portsmouth who has conducted research on the simulation theory, admits he has experienced the Mandela effect himself but doesn’t attribute the phenomenon to glitches in the simulation: That’d be a “cheap explanation,” he says.

Nevertheless, scientists waving away these explanations could have a detrimental effect: In the absence of expert engagement, there are plenty of people online who can bolster believers’ views. AJ is not surprised by these responses: “I just don’t think that physicists have given it a real hard look,” he says, “because they’re already certain that it’s explainable otherwise.” 

Bainbridge, for her part, thinks her study at least disproves the theory that we’ve been jumping between different universes. When she took those study participants who weren’t familiar with certain logos and mascots and showed them the correct version for the first time, she tested their memory by asking them to redraw the image only moments later, and still some drew the Mandela effect version. 

“It’s unlikely we jumped dimensions during that short time span,” she says, “so it seems like the Mandela effect is something more about the shortcuts our memories take, rather than something about parallel worlds.” She hopes her future work will help further elucidate these “shortcuts,” and she is even planning to see whether she can create her own Mandela effects. 

Leaving it all behind

One of the most well-documented memory phenomena is the “misinformation effect.” Since the 1970s, scientists have demonstrated that exposing people to misinformation after an event can alter their memories. If people are asked leading questions—say, “Did you see the broken headlight?” rather than “Did you see a broken headlight?” after witnessing a crash—they are more likely to report seeing something they didn’t. But on the flip side, warning witnesses about the threat of misinformation before they recount an event can increase the accuracy of their memory. 

In short, the way information is presented to us is crucial. This is why it was pretty poor form for YouGov to poll Americans about the Fruit of the Loom logo with a question that was easily open to misinterpretation: “Does the logo for the clothing company Fruit of the Loom have a cornucopia of fruit in it, or not?” It is unclear here which part is in question—the cornucopia or the fruit. But it was also poor form that I didn’t mention this until now—nor did I mention that Neil deGrasse Tyson later changed his mind about simulation theory and is now “convinced” that we do not live in a simulation. 

It was also probably pretty misleading of me to start this article with a link-free reference to Brooke Hermann’s eBay-listed shirt, which she believes features a cornucopia but to my eyes clearly features brown leaves. From the ’60s to the early ’00s, the Fruit of the Loom logo did include brown leaves behind the fruit; they were recolored green in 2003. When I started writing this article, I was certain that my Fruit of the Loom childhood PE kit had a cornucopia on the tag. I’m now convinced that 10-year-old me simply wasn’t looking that closely and thus I’ve misremembered the leaves as a horn. After all, even when I look at the current logo on shirts listed on the Fruit of the Loom website, my eyes still seem to want to make this mistake: From far away, I interpret the crowded cluster as a cornucopia.

The current Fruit of the Loom logo (left) and the version submitted in their 1973 trademark design application. Neither contain a cornucopia.

It’s as easy as that to convince me my memory was wrong—whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’ll let you decide. I’m clearly at one end of some sort of spectrum here. Other Mandela effect experiencers may believe something stranger is going on but are still prepared to happily get on with their lives. Larry Jung is a thirtysomething musician who was living in New Jersey when he spent hours hunting for Fruit of the Loom residue; in 2019, he even purchased a copy of a 1969 book for around $20 so he could see the cornucopia reference within it. “I did obsess about it for a while in the beginning,” says Jung, who remembers the cornucopia because he mistook it for a croissant as a child. “But then—I don’t know, I just came to this acceptance phase. I just didn’t want it to affect my life in a big way. I didn’t want to bring it up in every discussion.” 

Or, as another erstwhile Mandela effect researcher puts it: “If I just so happened to be living in a computer simulation, and that was my entire reality, what can I do about that?”

Don, the Mandela effect subreddit moderator, has seen waves of people move on while he has stayed active in the community for the better part of a decade (I first spoke to him for my New Statesman article in 2016). “I’ve recruited a lot of moderators, and they come and go pretty quick,” he says. 

Don says he experiences “more than average but less than all” examples of the Mandela effect (he too remembers the cornucopia on his childhood underpants). “They find solutions that they find acceptable,” he says of some people who leave the sub. For others, the cognitive dissonance becomes “too much,” he adds. “It interferes with their ability to function.” Don theorizes that the people who stay are people who experienced the Mandela effect organically, “in the wild,” he says, “before it was a well-known phenomenon”—arguably the antithesis of people jumping on an internet bandwagon.

“I compare it to someone who saw Bigfoot. If you were in the woods and Bigfoot walks into your campground and he scares you and your kids, eight feet tall, smells terrible—you’re not going to forget it.” 

AJ concurs that “anchor memories” like these are key. And yet Jung has a croissant-based anchor memory, and I myself have similar anecdotes about false memories I’ve found easy to let go. Psychologically, why does the Mandela effect affect people in such vastly different ways? Why do some people hold onto their memories while others don’t? 

“We know that most people’s intuitions about memory are wrong; they think of it as an accurate recording device when in fact memory is a reconstructive apparatus that is presenting us with recollections based on very fragmented snippets,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who writes computer simulations of memory to better understand how the mind works. “So most people will have an exaggerated sense of the accuracy of their own memories and will refuse to accept that they could be completely false.”

In recent years, Lewandowsky has studied misinformation and has coauthored The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, and he says that while some people move on from their conspiracy theories, others turn them into their identity. “They will enter a state,” he says, “in which they are extremely difficult to extract from their rabbit hole.” People who become highly committed to conspiracies “tend to be disgruntled and feel left behind by society and are extremely distrustful,” Lewandowsky adds. “Those people also tend to be high in narcissism and often exhibit paranoid thoughts.” 

Shauna Bowes is an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alabama who researches conspiratorial ideation, misinformation, and intellectual humility. Her work has found that people with this last quality—the tendency to acknowledge the limits of your own views—are less likely to believe misinformation. 

“Belief perseverance is when you double down on your beliefs, even if evidence contradicts them,” Bowes says. “There are many reasons why some are willing to change their minds while others do not. Personality traits, childhood experiences, social networks, cognitive styles, and more determine these processes. What we do know is that people who tend to be more cognitively flexible, humble, and generally open-minded also tend to change their minds more in response to evidence.” 

And yet when it comes to the Mandela effect, the question of “evidence” is a complicated one—after all, there’s plenty of cornucopia residue. Part of the trouble with understanding people’s responses to the Mandela effect is that the phenomenon can’t neatly be categorized as misinformation or conspiracy theory. 

Lewandowsky believes the Mandela effect is primarily a social phenomenon. “My take on it is that if many people believe that an event has happened, that becomes a social norm that other people can support by sharing that belief. Social norms are very powerful,” he says, adding that the internet “provides a great amplification machine.”

Creating reality

AJ tells me that even though skeptics have called him “so many derogatory names over the last nine years,” he remains passionate about spreading word of the Mandela effect. He wants to “push a dialogue” so that believers don’t feel afraid to speak out. Mostly, AJ wants scientists to look at the qualitative side of things: the hundreds of autobiographical accounts by people with very specific memories of things that are now officially said not to have happened the way they recall. He wishes scientists would speak to experiencers directly, the same way the once-skeptical astronomer Josef Allen Hynek spoke to UFO eyewitnesses in the mid-20th century. 

“Once upon a time, the UFO phenomenon was considered to be fringe. And now we have multiple world governments that have acknowledged that there is stuff flying around that we don’t know what it is,” AJ says. Overall, “the goal is to get the scientific establishment to at least consider the other side.” 

Of course, AJ is not alone, even if Mandela effect believers do exist on a spectrum. The community holds space for people having fun with the phenomenon, for those committed to just a single example of the effect, for others who dive in on a short-term basis before moving on—and for those who have run the International Mandela Effect Conference in locations across the US since 2019. 

And there’s Don, who is still moderating the subreddit after all these years and has seen believers of every stripe. “The thing that keeps me going is I want to make sure that it’s still here,” he says. “There’s a lot of history here, and I want to keep it around for that reason.” 

Personally, he believes there may be different explanations for different examples of the Mandela effect. It could be as simple as people confusing Fruit of the Loom with a knockoff brand, he says, or as complicated as Fruit of the Loom lying about the cornucopia as free advertising (though he also notes that no one has ever actually discovered an old Fruit of the Loom label with a cornucopia on it). 

Don also wonders whether some people might be guinea pigs caught up in longitudinal studies in which psychologists play with subjects’ memories. He’s considered, too, that nefarious tech bros could be digitally manipulating and deleting data on the internet as a form of social engineering, a possibility he compares to the Cambridge Analytica affair. “It’s something that’s possible. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening,” he says. “But this is the kind of thing that could be being done.” (To be clear: Don shared no evidence that this is being done.) 

Perhaps Don’s most interesting belief is that the Mandela effect is not a phenomenon but an “event”—one that may now in fact be over. In his opinion, there have been no significant or “persuasive” examples discovered since 2019 (when Redditors found that the character Baloo in Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book never wore a coconut bra). Don believes the community peaked between 2015 and 2018, when people were making new discoveries regularly. “There was a period of time where it was an actual event, like this was an ongoing event,” he says. He compares the whole thing to medieval manias in which people danced themselves to death: “I think the fervor with which the Mandela effect spread will likely be compared to dancing plagues by future generations.”

Toward the end of my second of three calls with AJ, he asked me if I’d also experienced the Mandela effect. I explained that historically I experienced it with Fruit of the Loom, but I’m prepared to believe it was just a false memory. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he said. But I started to wonder if it is. When I wrote about the Mandela effect in 2016, I wanted to write an exciting story with twists and turns, which arguably played up the mystery. Am I responsible for making some people question reality? What are the consequences of writing another article, the one you’re currently reading? How much am I creating reality by observing it?

To be “fair” to AJ, should I tell you that one of memory science’s most famous studies has recently come under fire, and some academics now believe that people aren’t as susceptible to false memories as we once thought? 

Or to be “fair” to you, the reader, should I stress that despite my own desire to believe in the mysteries of the universe, I’ve come away thinking that the biggest mystery of all is the human mind? 

Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features journalist who writes about culture, trends, and unusual phenomena. 

2025-10-30 18:00:00

It’s become a truism that facts alone don’t change people’s minds. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to conspiracy theories: Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. 

But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out that many conspiracy believers do respond to evidence and arguments—information that is now easy to deliver in the form of a tailored conversation with an AI chatbot.

In research we published in the journal Science this year, we had over 2,000 conspiracy believers engage in a roughly eight-minute conversation with DebunkBot, a model we built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo (the most up-to-date GPT model at that time). Participants began by writing out, in their own words, a conspiracy theory that they believed and the evidence that made the theory compelling to them. Then we instructed the AI model to persuade the user to stop believing in that conspiracy and adopt a less conspiratorial view of the world. A three-round back-and-forth text chat with the AI model (lasting 8.4 minutes on average) led to a 20% decrease in participants’ confidence in the belief, and about one in four participants—all of whom believed the conspiracy theory beforehand—indicated that they did not believe it after the conversation. This effect held true for both classic conspiracies (think the JFK assassination or the moon landing hoax) and more contemporary politically charged ones (like those related to the 2020 election and covid-19).

This is good news, given the outsize role that unfounded conspiracy theories play in today’s political landscape. So while there are widespread and legitimate concerns that generative AI is a potent tool for spreading disinformation, our work shows that it can also be part of the solution. 

Even people who began the conversation absolutely certain that their conspiracy was true, or who indicated that it was highly important to their personal worldview, showed marked decreases in belief. Remarkably, the effects were very durable; we followed up with participants two months later and saw just as big a reduction in conspiracy belief as we did immediately after the conversations. 

Our experiments indicate that many believers are relatively rational but misinformed, and getting them timely, accurate facts can have a big impact. Conspiracy theories can make sense to reasonable people who have simply never heard clear, non-conspiratorial explanations for the events they’re fixated on. This may seem surprising. But many conspiratorial claims, while wrong, seem reasonable on the surface and require specialized, esoteric knowledge to evaluate and debunk. 

For example, 9/11 deniers often point to the claim that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel as evidence that airplanes were not responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers—but the chatbot responds by pointing out that although this is true, the American Institute of Steel Construction says jet fuel does burn hot enough to reduce the strength of steel by over 50%, which is more than enough to cause such towers to collapse. 

Although we have greater access to factual information than ever before, it is extremely difficult to search that vast corpus of knowledge efficiently. Finding the truth that way requires knowing what to google—or who to listen to—and being sufficiently motivated to seek out conflicting information. There are large time and skill barriers to conducting such a search every time we hear a new claim, and so it’s easy to take conspiratorial content you stumble upon at face value. And most would-be debunkers at the Thanksgiving table make elementary mistakes that AI avoids: Do you know the melting point and tensile strength of steel offhand? And when your relative calls you an idiot while trying to correct you, are you able to maintain your composure? 

With enough effort, humans would almost certainly be able to research and deliver facts like the AI in our experiments. And in a follow-up experiment, we found that the AI debunking was just as effective if we told participants they were talking to an expert rather than an AI. So it’s not that the debunking effect is AI-specific. Generally speaking, facts and evidence delivered by humans would also work. But it would require a lot of time and concentration for a human to come up with those facts. Generative AI can do the cognitive labor of fact-checking and rebutting conspiracy claims much more efficiently. 

In another large follow-up experiment, we found that what drove the debunking effect was specifically the facts and evidence the model provided: Factors like letting people know the chatbot was going to try to talk them out of their beliefs didn’t reduce its efficacy, whereas telling the model to try to persuade its chat partner without using facts and evidence totally eliminated the effect. 

Although the foibles and hallucinations of these models are well documented, our results suggest that debunking efforts are widespread enough on the internet to keep the conspiracy-focused conversations roughly accurate. When we hired a professional fact-checker to evaluate GPT-4’s claims, they found that over 99% of the claims were rated as true (and not politically biased). Also, in the few cases where participants named conspiracies that turned out to be true (like MK Ultra, the CIA’s human experimentation program from the 1950s), the AI chatbot confirmed their accurate belief rather than erroneously talking them out of it.

To date, largely by necessity, interventions to combat conspiracy theorizing have been mainly prophylactic—aiming to prevent people from going down the rabbit hole rather than trying to pull them back out. Now, thanks to advances in generative AI, we have a tool that can change conspiracists’ minds using evidence. 

Bots prompted to debunk conspiracy theories could be deployed on social media platforms to engage with those who share conspiratorial content—including other AI chatbots that spread conspiracies. Google could also link debunking AI models to search engines to provide factual answers to conspiracy-related queries. And instead of arguing with your conspiratorial uncle over the dinner table, you could just pass him your phone and have him talk to AI. 

Of course, there are much deeper implications here for how we as humans make sense of the world around us. It is widely argued that we now live in a “post-truth” world, where polarization and politics have eclipsed facts and evidence. By that account, our passions trump truth, logic-based reasoning is passé, and the only way to effectively change people’s minds is via psychological tactics like presenting compelling personal narratives or changing perceptions of the social norm. If so, the typical, discourse-based work of living together in a democracy is fruitless.

But facts aren’t dead. Our findings about conspiracy theories are the latest—and perhaps most extreme—in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of facts and evidence. For example, while it was once believed that correcting falsehoods that aligns with one’s politics would just cause people to dig in and believe them even more, this idea of a “backfire” has itself been debunked: Many studies consistently find that corrections and warning labels reduce belief in, and sharing of, falsehoods—even among those who most distrust the fact-checkers making the corrections. Similarly, evidence-based arguments can change partisans’ minds on political issues, even when they are actively reminded that the argument goes against their party leader’s position. And simply reminding people to think about whether content is accurate before they share it can substantially reduce the spread of misinformation. 

And if facts aren’t dead, then there’s hope for democracy—though this arguably requires a consensus set of facts from which rival factions can work. There is indeed widespread partisan disagreement on basic facts, and a disturbing level of belief in conspiracy theories. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean our minds are inescapably warped by our politics and identities. When faced with evidence—even inconvenient or uncomfortable evidence—many people do shift their thinking in response. And so if it’s possible to disseminate accurate information widely enough, perhaps with the help of AI, we may be able to reestablish the factual common ground that is missing from society today.

You can try our debunking bot yourself at at debunkbot.com. 

Thomas Costello is an assistant professor in social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research integrates psychology, political science, and human-computer interaction to examine where our viewpoints come from, how they differ from person to person, and why they change—as well as the sweeping impacts of artificial intelligence on these processes.

Gordon Pennycook is the Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow and associate professor of psychology at Cornell University. He examines the causes and consequences of analytic reasoning, exploring how intuitive versus deliberative thinking shapes decision-making to understand errors underlying issues such as climate inaction, health behaviors, and political polarization.

David Rand is a professor of information science, marketing and management communication, and psychology at Cornell University. He uses approaches from computational social science and cognitive science to explore how human-AI dialogue can correct inaccurate beliefs, why people share falsehoods, and how to reduce political polarization and promote cooperation.