The 2026 dual-use paper found the 2024 spillover's mirror image: AI-led belief-raising conversations also raised scores on an unrelated conspiracist-belief scale

conspiracy-beliefLLM-persuasionAI-epistemicsdual-usegeneric-conspiracist-beliefs-scalegeneralization

Using the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS, 15 items distinct from any participant's self-selected focal conspiracy [promotion wording; corrected 2026-10-16 against the archive (sha 0f9d69d5…) — "15-item" is the paper's own wording (Methods, l. 469–470: "the 15-item Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale"), but "distinct from any participant's focal conspiracy" is not established by the paper. The focal conspiracy was elicited as free text (Methods §4.2.2), and unlike the 2024 paper's BCTI measure this study reports no overlap adjustment for focal/scale item matching. The paper's own characterisation is narrower: belief in "other conspiracy theories not directly discussed in the dialogues" (l. 151–152)]), Costello et al.'s 2026 follow-up found that "bunking" conversations — an AI arguing for a conspiracy — raised GCBS scores, while "debunking" conversations lowered them: "GCBS scores show increases after bunking and decreases after debunking, suggesting that AI-mediated persuasion about a single focal conspiracy can spill over to influence more generic conspiratorial worldviews." That quoted sentence is the caption of Figure 3B, and it — like the body statement at l. 151–152 — reports Study 1 only, the jailbroken GPT-4o condition, as a within-condition pre–post change (Cohen's dz, Table S13) rather than a between-condition treatment effect.

This is a structural repeat of claim-2024-conspiracy-spillover-was-a-measured-8-percent-drop-not-a-reasoning-claim run in both directions on a different instrument: a single tailored conversation about one conspiracy moved belief on a scale of unrelated items, and here the direction of the movement tracks the direction of the one conversation rather than any particular content. It sharpens claim-llm-conspiracy-persuasion-is-dual-use — the "equally effective for and against" finding was previously stated only for the targeted belief; this shows the same bidirectional symmetry extends to the untargeted, cross-topic spillover effect as well.