J. Godbout
Publications
What do people want to fact-check?
Research on misinformation has focused almost exclusively on supply, asking what falsehoods circulate, who produces them, and whether corrections work. A basic demand-side question remains unanswered. When ordinary people can fact-check anything they want, what do they actually ask about? We provide the first large-scale evidence on this question by analyzing close to 2{,}500 statements submitted by 457 participants to an open-ended AI fact-checking system. Each claim is classified along five semantic dimensions (domain, epistemic form, verifiability, target entity, and temporal reference), producing a behavioral map of public verification demand. Three findings stand out. First, users range widely across topics but default to a narrow epistemic repertoire, overwhelmingly submitting simple descriptive claims about present-day observables. Second, roughly one in four requests concerns statements that cannot be empirically resolved, including moral judgments, speculative predictions, and subjective evaluations, revealing a systematic mismatch between what users seek from fact-checking tools and what such tools can deliver. Third, comparison with the FEVER benchmark dataset exposes sharp structural divergences across all five dimensions, indicating that standard evaluation corpora encode a synthetic claim environment that does not resemble real-world verification needs. These results reframe fact-checking as a demand-driven problem and identify where current AI systems and benchmarks are misaligned with the uncertainty people actually experience.
Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be persuasive across a variety of contexts. But it remains unclear whether this persuasive power advantages truth over falsehood, or if LLMs can promote misbeliefs just as easily as refuting them. Here, we investigate this question across three pre-registered experiments in which participants (N = 2,724 Americans) discussed a conspiracy theory they were uncertain about with GPT-4o, and the model was instructed to either argue against ("debunking") or for ("bunking") that conspiracy. When using a "jailbroken" GPT-4o variant with guardrails removed, the AI was as effective at increasing conspiracy belief as decreasing it. Concerningly, the bunking AI was rated more positively, and increased trust in AI, more than the debunking AI. Surprisingly, we found that using standard GPT-4o produced very similar effects, such that the guardrails imposed by OpenAI did little to prevent the LLM from promoting conspiracy beliefs. Encouragingly, however, a corrective conversation reversed these newly induced conspiracy beliefs, and simply prompting GPT-4o to only use accurate information dramatically reduced its ability to increase conspiracy beliefs. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs possess potent abilities to promote both truth and falsehood, but that potential solutions may exist to help mitigate this risk.