Like Llama facts, this project is originally from 2021. When making this website I thought it would be fun to demo the results however.
For a long time now, I have been fascinated by conspiracy theories. When I younger I have been down my fair share of youtube declassified CIA rabbitholes, 'unsolved internet mysteries' and similar rabbitholes. I just like a good story. So, naturally, in 2016 I subscribed to Reddit's r/conspiracy. Unfortunately, the quality of these conspiracies were terrible, and if they would not make me laugh, they would make me cringe. The worst thing was that people in the comments (or, more probable, the bots in the comments) believed them. So, to show how easy it was to follow the pattern and create new conspiracies, I trained a Llama model to create new conspiracies. So, I scraped all r/conspiracy posts I could find (about 200,000 posts), pre processed a bit, and started the LoRA training.
After training, I used ChatGPT to generate titles of new conspiracies, containing the core idea of the theory. The model then argues its way into the theory. The model tended to generate fairly short theories, so after generation decided to discard theories that turned out to be too short. One notable string that occurs in many generated theories (and thus in many 'real' theories), is that frequently start with something among the lines of "I don't know if this is the right place to post ..." or "you are probably not going to believe me, but ...". This probably occurs a lot in the training data as a way to seem more normal or level headed to the reader
originally I planned to post the theories to the subreddit and see who believed them. Unfortunately, I got bored of Reddit before that so instead I will post them here :)