The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Calum Lister Matheson, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories; these are driven by psychological factors, but also substantially facilitated by the information access provided by Internet technologies – from hypertext through search to AI. This has resulted in the demise of symbolic efficiency.
This can be understood through paranoid-metonymies theory: it begins with foreclosure that rejects organising signifiers, fills the gaps with delusion, and produces certainty and a commitment to absolute truth beyond the evidence. In conspiracy culture, this works through the decline of symbolic efficiency, giving ruse to conspiracy theories, and even to fanaticism.
But in online contexts we have also seen a new phase defined by the collective decoding of supposed signs pointing to the conspiracy; this looks for an other behind the other, and might also be driven by a pro-noic rather than paranoid belief in a force for good behind the conspiracy theory.
The next disruption to this comes from AI: people are now engaging with AI chatbots as a kind of oracle that serves as a source of the hidden truth and becomes a new symbolic authority, replacing the old. This combines both pronoia and paranoia, then: it appeals to supposedly scientific information gleaned via chatbot interactions to reject actual science.
The AI chatbot serves here as an oracle providing direct revelations of ‘truth’; users have faith in its knowledge and power. Historically, the Oracle of Delphi worked in a similar way: it affirmed the delusions of those doing the questioning. So AI does not hallucinate so much as respond to the delusions it is confronted with.
AI psychosis might be understood as a kind of conspiracy thinking, then; this is not a rejection of the truth (which was always a questionable concept), but a commitment to some kind of actual, other truth. This also means that using AI to debunk conspiracy theories is unlikely to work; to emphasise science and truth may not work, because true believers are already deeply committed to these, just not in the way most other people are. The signifier of ‘science’ isn’t doing the work we want it to do – rather, it would be important to take a more Sophist view that admits that reality is complex, contradictory, and debatable.
