Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality

More and more people are learning about the world through chatbots and the software’s kin, whether they mean to or not.

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Pataranutaporn and his fellow researchers recently sought to understand how chatbots could manipulate our understanding of the world by, in effect, implanting false memories. To do so, the researchers adapted methods used by the UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who established decades ago that memory is manipulable.

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Loftus, who collaborated on the study, told me that one of the most powerful techniques for memory manipulation—whether by a human or by an AI—is to slip falsehoods into a seemingly unrelated question.

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“When you give people feedback about their answers, you’re going to affect them,” Loftus told me. If that feedback is positive, as AI responses tend to be, “then you’re going to get them to be more likely to accept it, true or false.”

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