The Conspiracy Generator

How to Turn Any News Story Into a Conspiracy Theory in a Matter of Seconds, by guest contributor Maarten Boudry

Conspiracy theories have long been treated as fringe beliefs, tantamount to UFOs, ESP, and other popular delusions of mad crowds, and those who believe them as a bunch of mostly nerdy middle age white guys living in their parents' basements. I debunked these myths in a 2021 study conducted with my colleagues at the Skeptic Research Center of the beliefs of over 3,000 randomly selected Americans on 29 different conspiracy theories. The results (reported in my book Conspiracy) were alarming: A quarter of all Americans believe that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government, a fifth think that Barack Obama was not born on U.S. soil, that global warming is a hoax, and that QAnon is real, and over a quarter believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

In that survey we made up a fake conspiracy theory—that the government is covering up information about the “COVID vaccine magnetic reaction” (there is no such thing)—inspired as we were by another conspiracy survey that found many people believed the government is covering up information about the “Dakota crash,” which the researchers just made up. Since then I have wondered how difficult (or easy) it would be to create fake conspiracy theories online, but wonder no more as the Ghent University philosopher and conspiracy scholar Maarten Boudry invented his own “Conspiracy Generator” that allows anyone to create their own conspiracy theory out of current events. Try it yourself by channeling your inner Alex Jones, and enjoy this guest author edition of Skeptic!

—Michael Shermer

Dr. Maarten Boudry is a philosopher of science and first holder of the Etienne Vermeersch Chair of Critical Thinking at Ghent University. He published over 50 papers in academic journals on pseudoscience, cultural evolution, conspiracy theories, climate policy, science and religion, reasoning fallacies, metaphors in science, and evolutionary epistemology. Together with Massimo Pigliucci, he edited the collections Science Unlimited? On the Challenges of Scientism (2018) and Philosophy of Pseudoscience. Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (2013). He also wrote six books in Dutch on science and philosophy for the general audience, and has written essays for Quillette, The Independent, The New York Times (The Stone), Areo Magazine, Le Point, Die Welt, and other newspapers. You can follow Maarten on Substack or X/Twitter

The Conspiracy Generator

How to Turn Any News Story Into a Conspiracy Theory in a Matter of Seconds

Maarten Boudry

What will the next major world event be? It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, as an old Danish proverb says (variously attributed to Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra or Mark Twain). But here’s one thing I can predict with great confidence: whatever happens, the event will soon spark a range of conspiracy theories gainsaying the official version of events. Some people – most likely a substantial number of people – will claim that the official story is just a cover-up for something far darker and more sinister. Everything was carefully staged, they will say, and we’re being duped on a massive scale.

How is it possible to make such a confident prediction without a crystal ball? Because it is, in fact, extremely easy to fabricate a conspiracy theory regardless of what will happen and who, if anyone, will be responsible; and because conspiracy theories, for both psychological and epistemological reasons, exert a great deal of attraction on the human mind. Even if the official version of the new world event already involves a conspiracy (as in the case of 9/11 or Watergate), people will still come up with second-order conspiracies rejecting the official version. Richard Nixon and Al Qaeda have been framed, they will say, and the 19 terrorists allegedly from Al Qaeda were just stooges hired by the real culprits.

Want to find out for yourself how easy it is to fabricate a conspiracy theory around any given news event, even multiple and contradictory conspiracy theories? Now you can! My philosopher colleague Marco Meyer and I, together with some tech wizards from Tech Jobs International, have designed an interactive, fully automated Conspiracy Generator to make the process as simple as possible. Just follow three simple steps and select three parameters (official story, culprit and motive), and our generator will spit out an intriguing, shocking, mind-bending, earth-shattering, but still (somewhat) plausible-sounding conspiracy theory.

A Recipe for Making Conspiracy Theories

How does the Conspiracy Generator work? It is based on a “recipe” for concocting conspiracy theories that I developed in an academic paper in the journal Episteme. A version of this recipe is fed into GPT-4, which then spins conspiracist yarns according to the instructions in the recipe and the parameters selected by the user. You can try out the recipe for yourself, although it might take you more than the few seconds that GPT needs to come up with something original and coherent. Here’s it is:

○      Reject the official story. Whatever the official version of events accepted by mainstream media or scientists or elite institutions, this is just a cover-up story created by the real culprits. By definition, the deceptive efforts of the real conspirators will appear successful, since the view they want to impose on the rest of society is exactly what has ended up as the mainstream one. If the official version of events already involves a conspiracy, as with 9/11, just posit a higher-order conspiracy, in which the official plot is just a false-flag operation. Remember: whoever is blamed in the official version is by definition innocent.

○      Hunt for anomalies. Comb through the official version of what happened and look for any puzzling details, anomalies, or contradictions. Since no explanation of any event is ever complete, this will be easy. Remember, you’re “just asking questions” at this point. If defenders of the official version cannot readily answer all your questions, you have demonstrated that the official version cannot possibly be true. And if they can, well, you’ve just been doing your due diligence, right?

○      Connect the dots: Next you need to fabricate some “evidence” that implicates your culprit and reveal their evil schemes. Try to be creative and forge some suspicious connections between the story and your culprits (GPT can be quite creative here, see below).

○      Find your culprit. Find someone who stands to benefit from what happened, or could conceivably have benefited. Cui bono? That’s your culprit. As major historical events will always happen to benefit someone or another, this step also won’t be too difficult. If you can’t identify a good culprit, pick a random one, as our Conspiracy Generator does.

○      Dismiss counterevidence. Can’t find enough evidence for your conspiracy? Don’t be discouraged! You just have to spin a story insinuating that evidence may be lacking precisely because the conspirators have been carefully covering up their tracks. In a similar vein, apparent “counterevidence” could have been planted by the conspirators to throw courageous truth-seekers such as yourself off the scent. Didn’t we tell you they are very devious?

○      Exasperate your critics. Defenders of the official version will try to explain your anomalies. Don’t give up. Keep asking more questions and throw up more anomalies. (You can even make stuff up; if your opponent can’t find the source, it must have been deleted from the Internet by the conspirators.) Eventually your critics will lose patience and start ignoring you, since it always takes more time to answer a question than to raise it. As soon as your critics give up (or lose their temper and snap at you), confront them: Are they trying to hide something?

The Conspiracy Generator often produces remarkably creative (but ridiculous) connections between completely random parameters. For instance, one run started with an innocent-sounding story about the birth of some endangered bats in a Viennese zoo. So could the generator spin a story in which (say) the Knights Templar are scheming behind the scenes, and their motive is to (say) manipulate the weather? No problem. The Conspiracy Generator forges a spurious link between the fact that bats give birth “upside-down, creating a ‘hammock’ with their wings”, and the “symbolic hanging upside-down” of the Knight Templar’s initiation rites. But how could bats help to manipulate weather patterns? Says the generator: "As mammals capable of perceiving weather changes, bats could potentially be harnessed as living barometers".

In a story about the intergalactic schemes of a group called the "Juice Cartel'', we get all sorts of juice puns and allusions: "Critics might smirk at the idea of a juice industry controlling our space agendas. But as we peer deeper, we'll undoubtedly uncover far more spilled juice than we're led to believe." In a particularly insane story about a group of Elvis Presley Poltergeists creating artificial food and water scarcity, the generator deals with skeptics like this: "If the swaying motion of Elvis could hypnotize an arena full of adoring fans, who's to say his spectral manipulations couldn't have fooled them too?"

Some other titles of conspiracy stories produced by the generator:

• The Knights Templar's Crypto Conquest: A Secret Ploy for Space Colonization

• Unveiling the Hidden Harmonies: How David Bowie Orchestrated Brexit to Tune Up British Music Dominance

• The Temporal Transhuman Ploy - The Ultimate Push for a Techno-Utopia

• Unearthed: AI Overlords' Diabolical Plan Using Ancient Burials and Psychic Epidemics!

• Striking a Dissonant Chord: The Jazz Cabal and Its Sinister Role in the 2008 Financial Crisis

Epistemic Black Holes

What explains the allure of conspiracy theories? Most basically, of course, some conspiracies are real. No sensible person would deny that sometimes people form secret coalitions to achieve some nefarious (or at least illegal) goal, and the pages of history are replete with such plots: the murder of Julius Caesar was a conspiracy, as was the October Revolution in Russia, Hitler’s operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the surprise attack of Arab states against Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up by the Nixon administration. Indeed, almost all putsches, assassinations, and political revolutions fall under the heading of “conspiracies.” People have been conspiring against each other for as long as there have been people.

From an evolutionary point of view, it therefore makes sense that we have also evolved defenses against conspiracies. As Julius Caesar found out the hard way, being on the receiving end of a conspiracy can be highly detrimental to your biological fitness. If you are alert to clues suggesting that people are conspiring against you, and you can expose the plot before it’s brought to fruition, you are more likely to survive long enough to procreate. As with many other recurrent dangers, the problem of identifying conspiracies follows the smoke detector principle. If you buy a smoke detector, above all you want it to sound the alarm when there is an actual fire, even if that means having to put up with occasional false alarms. It pays to err on the side of caution.

Beyond these psychological roots, however, conspiracy theories also have a uniquely warped epistemology. In my paper, I describe them as epistemological “black holes” (a metaphor I borrowed from the philosopher Stephen Law), into which unwary truth-seekers are drawn, and from which it is exceedingly difficult to escape. As far as I’m aware, conspiracy theories are the only theories that predict an absence of evidence in their favor (and, hence, treat that absence as evidence in itself). And that makes sense. If you start investigating a possible conspiracy, it is reasonable not to be deterred by a lack of evidence, or even by the discovery of apparent counterevidence. After all, every detective knows that criminals cover up their tracks and that any material evidence (fingerprints, DNA, a smoking gun) could have been planted by the real culprit to frame a perfectly innocent person (although such things happen less often in real life than in crime dramas with far-fetched plot twists). But at exactly what point should you abandon your conspiratorial hypothesis? Unfortunately, there’s no bright line separating reasonable theorizing from full-blown paranoia. A useful rule-of-thumb is that, if your conspiracy can only be rescued from refutation at the cost of making the alleged conspirators superhumanly clever and powerful, it’s probably time to give up your theory.

By dint of their self-sealing logic, conspiracy theories can fend off any apparent counterevidence, and this is a trick that our Conspiracy Generator is programmed to use every time. If some piece of material evidence seems to refute your theory, you can say that it has been planted there. If an eyewitness contradicts your story, perhaps he was bribed. If an investigation by some reputable newspaper or government agency fails to unearth any signs of conspiracy, this just proves that they too must have been complicit in the plot. Indeed, academics who research conspiracy communities are regularly accused of sinister malfeasance by the very people they study, just as paranoid schizophrenics often accuse their psychiatrists of being out to harm them.

Moreover, researchers have found that one of the strongest predictors for belief in any particular conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories. This, too, makes sense. Once you start believing that we have been duped about one event (say, the moon landing), and that the conspirators have never been held accountable, you will become more suspicious about other official accounts of history. Indeed, why would you believe anything you read in the newspaper? Before you know it, you have crossed the event horizon of the black hole, the point beyond which returning to the realm of reason becomes impossible.

Because of their self-sealing logic, it is notoriously hard to reason people out of their conspiracy beliefs (although a recent study has demonstrated some success in reducing such beliefs through the use of AI dialogues). With our Conspiracy Theory, we pursue an indirect approach. Rather than trying to refute any given conspiracy theory, we help people to appreciate how easy it is to fabricate conspiracy theories around any event, regardless of the evidence. Stronger still, we show that it is always possible to generate multiple and mutually contradictory conspiracy theories, using the same bag of tricks.

This proliferation of conflicting theories is a real problem in the world of conspiracy buffs. For instance, a 2013 Gallup poll asked people if they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and, if not, who really killed JFK. After half a century of conspiracy theorizing and hundreds of books and films and thousands of articles disputing the official story, the results still proffered a wide array of culprits: the Mafia (13%), the Federal Government (13%), the CIA (7%), Cuba and Fidel Castro (5%), JFK’s own vice-president Lyndon Johnson (3%), the Soviet Union (3%), the Ku Klux Klan (3%), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (1%), and various other actors. In light of the peculiar epistemology of conspiracy theories, it is impossible to rule out the complicity of any of these potential culprits, assuming that they were careful enough to cover their tracks and falsely incriminate others.

Flooding the Zone

But what if some gullible people fall for the nonsense that our Conspiracy Generator produces? Are we not inadvertently contributing to our current disinformation crisis, “flooding the zone” with even more shit (as Steve Bannon advised the Trump campaign team to do in 2015)? I think that’s highly unlikely. In its current form, the Conspiracy Generator does not allow for a free input of stories, culprits and motives, and the choices on offer are deliberately light-hearted and rather ridiculous. Granted, according to a famous bit of Internet wisdom called Poe’s Law, it is impossible to make a parody so extreme and ridiculous that no-one will mistake it for real.

But even if some people fail to spot our parodic intentions despite the copious disclaimers, thus vindicating Poe’s Law, that still doesn’t mean they will believe the conspiracy story: it just means that they will mistake our AI-generated pastiche for a real article written by a real conspiracy buff (which kind of proves our point). Our hope is that if people see through the mechanisms of silly conspiracy theories, they will be better placed to spot the “serious” ones — some of which are, frankly, not that much less silly (e.g., Flat Earthers).

Mind you, our purpose with the Conspiracy Generator is not to discredit all explanations involving conspiracies. Again, some conspiracies are very real. However, most famous conspiracies from history books are abundantly supported by multiple lines of evidence (incriminating documents, eyewitness testimonies, tape recordings, confessions, etc.). It is possible that some conspiracies are so flawlessly executed that no-one will ever expose them, but this becomes more implausible as the number of conspirators and accomplice grows, as Michael Shermer wrote: “Conspiracies involving large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets typically fail. People can be incompetent and emotional. They screw up, chicken out, change their minds, have moral scruples.” Or more succinctly, in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead”. As our Conspiracy Generator makes clear, in the absence of clear and positive evidence for a conspiracy hypothesis, it is easy to gradually fall into a black hole, never to return.

Even a confirmed skeptic like me can sometimes feel the “gravitational” attraction of conspiracy theories. While I firmly believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that Neil Armstrong really walked on the moon, and that 19 hijackers with box cutters really brought down the Twin Towers, for some fleeting moments I can feel the pull of the alternatives, despite all rational objections. In Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, the protagonist stumbles upon a mysterious cabal of masked men in a mansion outside New York City (according to many conspiracy theorists, it was Kubrick who staged the moon landing in a Hollywood study and then cryptically ‘confessed’ to it in his later movies). When I watch that famous orgy scene with the Venetian masks, featuring British composer Jocelyn Pook’s eerie soundtrack (playing a recording of chanting Romanian monks backwards), I can feel the strange allure of conspiracy-land: what if it’s all true?

What if the world is run by an ancient cabal of extremely powerful men performing human sacrifices, and what if only a few brave truth-seekers, widely discredited as “conspiracy crackpots”, have caught on to their evil schemes? Wouldn’t we expect to find not a shred of evidence for this?

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.