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Humans love their conspiracy theories. As we’ve heard time and again, conspiracies are a devil to untangle from people’s identities and what they want to believe about the world. Anyone trying to contest them is seen as part of the Deep State cover-up. Many interventions have been tried over the decades—offering counterarguments or priming participants to engage in analytical thinking—but a 2023 review of 25 studies found that most existing methods of changing conspiracy beliefs don’t work. This year, though, two studies conducted by psychologists from MIT and Cornell University suggest that when artificial intelligence presents sufficient counterfactual evidence, believers are more apt to change their minds. The first study, published in Science, drew from data from over 1,000 participants. The researchers found that subjects reduced their belief in their chosen conspiracy by, on average, 20 percent after conversing with ChatGPT4-Turbo, a large language model built by OpenAI that had absorbed knowledge from the Internet through April 2023.