Uncover the Truth: AI-Powered Bigfoot Detection
Fact-Checking Just Got a Whole Lot Easier with Snopes’ New AI Tool
Urban legends and outlandish stories often send people scrambling to fact-checking sites like Snopes to separate fact from fiction. Now, the legendary fact-checking site has introduced an AI-powered tool called FactBot to help you verify those pesky rumors and confirm or debunk celebrity gossip.
How FactBot Works
FactBot uses Snopes’ vast archive of information and generative AI to answer your questions without requiring you to sift through articles. When you ask a question, FactBot searches Snopes’ database and provides a conversational answer. The AI model is built on Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 AI model, in collaboration with California Polytechnic’s Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The Power of AI
AI models are notorious for occasionally providing nonsensical or outright wrong answers. To address this issue, Snopes has ensured that FactBot only draws from its databases, avoiding hallucinations or outdated information. Each answer includes links to the original articles used to compose them. If FactBot can’t find enough information to answer your question, it will politely let you know that it doesn’t have enough information to respond.
FactBot Fun
Snopes sees FactBot as a way to speed up fact-checking not just for its audience but also internally. The AI chatbot has been integrated into Snopes’ newsroom to help identify trending topics based on what people are asking. This allows Snopes to pursue popular topics that FactBot may not be able to answer yet.
The Future of Fact-Checking
Snopes isn’t the only one leveraging AI chatbots to answer questions about facts. The Washington Post has created Climate Answers, a similar tool that relies on its climate journalism to answer questions directly on the topic. As AI technology continues to evolve, tools like FactBot are likely to play an increasingly important role in making the internet a reliable source of information and combating misinformation.
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