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28 The College of New Jersey Magazine Hillary Clinton and a cabal of loyalists were sexually abusing children in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Never mind that the business didn't have a basement. A North Carolina man took the story to heart and used a military- style assault rifle to shoot through the lock of a closet in the restaurant; he was later sentenced to four years in prison. More broadly, there's the threat some theories pose to democratic norms, such as former President Donald Trump's "big lie" about a stolen election, which fed into the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. That one's "a bit tricky to talk about," D'Angelo says. The Trump team's purported facts about the outcome of the 2020 election have been thoroughly debunked by democratic institutions, such as the court system on state and federal levels, he notes. "But when discussing and dissecting those facts in class, some students may feel as though I am professing from my own ideological perspective." In those cases, D'Angelo says he leans heavily on findings of scientific organizations and legitimate institutions. "I want students to be able to think for themselves, but do so by taking into account and debating what others have found out through rigorous inquiry." What should probably make all of us uncomfortable is disinformation and "deep fake" imagery, already proliferating, and now getting a rocket-fuel boost from artificial intelligence. Shortly after the debut of Open AI's ChatGPT app in late 2022, more than 1,000 leading tech scientists, policy experts, and executives signed a statement warning AI carried a potential "extinction" threat that should be made "a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." PEN America, a free-expression advocacy organization, warned in particular that "generative" AI, or systems that create their own text, audio, and image content, "has the potential to supercharge tools of deception and repression." "This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet," Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, told the New York Times in early 2023. Neither Arndt nor D'Angelo counts himself among the doomy, however. Arndt, who also works for Silicon Valley companies as an AI trainer to help make large language models smarter and safer, is optimistic that the leading tech firms will continue Today, online, you can buy a create-your-own-conspiracy-theory set of refrigerator magnets, complete with a tin foil hat. Still, public derision of woo-woo apparently does little to curb the bottomless appetite for it. September 11, 2001 In disbelief: The terrorist attacks were an inside job because President George W. Bush wanted to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq for oil. We hold these truths: Extensive reports from the 9/11 commission and other expert groups refute the existence of any hidden conspiracy. Bigfoot Creature claim: Sightings of a large, hairy, human-like being in North American forests. A prolonged prank: The myth was popularized in 1958, when a Northern California logger, Ray Wallace, faked the wild man's footprints, and the Humboldt Times ran with the story for fun. In 2002, Wallace's children revealed it was their father's joke; yet, decades later there are still reports of sightings. Area 51 The cover: It's a military installation where the government experiments on actual alien life forms that came to Earth in a crash-landing in the secluded Nevada desert in the 1940s. In all honesty: It really is a U.S. Air Force military base with an official name of Nevada Test and Training Range that is used to train aircrews for combat readiness. But because it is closed to the public, mystery still surrounds it. CONTINUED

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