The AI Conspiracy Theories Are Coming | RAND

Even so, its beneficial uses might be limited by conspiracy beliefs that deter its adoption or target those who deploy it.

That yawning gap in our own understanding of how AI arrives at its responses to our prompts is exactly the kind of narrative void that conspiracy theories step in to help fill.

many of the algorithms that undergird AI are designed to make predictions or identify relationships based on existing data, which means such models provide correlation, not causation.

Rather than AI giving rise to online misinformation or censorship, algorithms could be shown to be a mere reflection of ourselves, surfacing what we desire to see.

When one prompts these tools with a question, they throw together massive amounts of information and spit out a simplified result that seems to make sense. Because the results are both sophisticated and delivered to us in a voice like our own, it's natural for people to assume AI's claims to be correct.

Likewise, conspiracy theories present disparate facts wrapped up in neat narratives. They do all the heavy lifting that critical thinking would otherwise demand. One can just sit back and believe.