The September 2024 article found conversing with an AI chatbot called DebunkBot reduced people’s belief in a particular conspiracy theory by an average of 20%. The research was featured in news stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. In February, 2026, the authors won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, for the work.

According to the notice published on June 11, 2026, the authors learned of issues with the public dataset that “made it challenging to reproduce some of the specific values reported in the manuscript.” After investigating, the authors also discovered “inconsistencies in the application of screening criteria between the manuscript and published analysis pipeline.”

The researchers reported the issue to Science and provided their raw datasets along with updated results, which the journal is now evaluating, the notice says. The reanalysis “produces results that match those in the original article in direction, statistical significance, and substantive size.”

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/06/11/science-ai-chatbots-debunk-conspiracy-theories-expression-of-concern/

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