Tom Costello
@tomstello_
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research psychologist + assistant professor @AmericanU (joining @CarnegieMellon this summer)
Cambridge, MA
Joined October 2017
Our new paper, out on (the cover of!) Science is now live!.
🚨Out in Science!🚨.Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, ya?.WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20%!.-Lasts over 2mo.-Works on entrenched beliefs.-Tailored AI response rebuts specific evidence offered by believers.1/
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RT @QuentinAnthon15: I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies fo….
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This is the game Balatro for programmers.
There’s a cursed C++ competition where programmers try to create the largest possible error message. Finalists created ~1.5GB of error messages from just 256 bytes of source. Preprocessor exploits were so easy, they had to create a separate division! Here's my favorites:
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RT @tomstello_: Conspiracies emerge in the wake of high-profile events, but you can’t contemporaneously debunk them with evidence . becau….
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Huge thanks to my brilliant co-authors: Nathaniel Rabb (who split the work with me and is co-first author), Nick Stagnaro, @GordPennycook, @DG_Rand . We're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback.
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Also, the treatment succeeded for both Democrats and Republicans, who endorsed slightly different conspiratorial explanations of the assassination attempts
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(the most notable part?): The effect was durable and preventative. When we recontacted participants 2 months later after the second assassination attempt, those from the tx group were ~50% less likely to endorse conspiracies about this new event (as shown below)!
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Did this work? Yes. The Gemini dialogues significantly reduced conspiracy beliefs compared to controls who chatted about an irrelevant topic or just read a fact sheet (d = .38). The effect was robust across multiple measures. Key figure attached
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Compared to our other studies (where AI debunked well-known conspiracies), the LLM used fundamentally different persuasive strategies. Instead of using facts (which aren't available, since no one knew what was going on!), it promoted epistemic caution & critical thinking.
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PDF: Just days after the assassination attempt on Trump last year, we recruited people who endorsed conspiracies about it and had them interact with Gemini 1.5 Pro (prompted to debunk).
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Conspiracies emerge in the wake of high-profile events, but you can’t contemporaneously debunk them with evidence . because little yet exists. Nonetheless, we show that LLMs can debunk conspiracies during an ongoing event (attempted assassination of Trump) in a new WP!
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RT @sinclair_allie: In this letter in @PNASNews, we respond to a comment on our recent paper. Although multiple factors shape whether we….
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RT @marcel_binz: Excited to see our Centaur project out in @Nature. TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates hum….
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This argument with 3m views is AI-generated, fwiw. (Saying this as someone whose research involves AI persuasion, thus have read many such arguments).
“abolish capitalism!”. cool. who grows the food???. no seriously—who’s out there at dawn breaking their back in the dirt, fixing broken irrigation lines, replacing a tractor axle in 110° heat—for free? because you think profit is mean?. who mines the lithium for your laptop, the.
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RT @ttkeskinturk: I fielded an experiment on dynamic constraint and ended up with null results (surprise!). rather than trying to publish i….
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RT @AnthropicAI: New Anthropic Research: How people use Claude for emotional support. From millions of anonymized conversations, we studie….
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This is a stellar paper -- highly recommend if you want an incisive birds-eye view of AI + political science .
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RT @Ross_Dahlke: "Deep canvassing" conversations with AI can durably reduce prejudice and change policy opinions, finds @tomstello_ @GordPe….
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RT @TaniaLombrozo: Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make….
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RT @tangenjm: A psychology student tells you they’re a “visual learner.” A teacher sorts kids by learning styles. Both believe something th….
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RT @bakkermichiel: Excited to be a mentor through this FLF Fellowship! Apply to work with me on AI-mediated collective decision making, for….
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