Anyone on social media these days has encountered a bot. An algorithm-driven fake account that engages in some nefarious activity, whether it’s turning uncontroversial points into debates, repping the Kremlin’s talking points, or directing you to pussy in bio, the bots are enshittifying social media at an alarming rate, especially now that artificial intelligence allows them to be more convincing, more targeted, and faster to set up en masse. But what if we could turn this pernicious technology into a tool for good? Among other things, academics are training bots to talk people down from conspiracy theories and update their views on climate change to be more factually accurate. One of those academics is Yara Kyrychenko, a PhD candidate, lab manager, and Gates Scholar at Cambridge University’s Social Decision-Making Lab. Her research combines psychological theory with big data and behavioural science methods to study how we can make human-technology interactions more constructive. She joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick, to talk about socially responsible AI.

Yara's webpage:

https://www.sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/staff/yara-kyrychenko

Yara wanted me to issue a correction: Ukrainian is only in the top 20, not top 10 languages spoken on the internet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

Chatbots and conspiracy theories:

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/using-an-ai-powered-street-epistemologist-chatbot-and-reflection-tasks-to-diminish-conspiracy-theory-beliefs/#:~:text=An%20AI%2Dpowered%20chatbot%20instructed,strength%20of%20conspiracy%20theory%20beliefs.