With the entire tech industry shifting its attention to these products, it may be time to pay more attention to the persuasive form of AI outputs, and not just their content. Chatbots and AI search engines can be false prophets, vectors of misinformation that are less obvious, and perhaps more dangerous, than a fake article or video. “The model hallucination doesn’t end” with a given AI tool, Pat Pataranutaporn, who researches human-AI interaction at MIT, told me. “It continues, and can make us hallucinate as well.”

Pataranutaporn and his fellow researchers recently sought to understand how chatbots could manipulate our understanding of the world by, in effect, implanting false memories. To do so, the researchers adapted methods used by the UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who established decades ago that memory is manipulable.