AI - Potential new fact checker

Trying to think of a way that we can learn to work off of the same page of information/facts led me to a bigger concern. As I pondered the concept of AI becoming a fact checker to monitor social media, I began to think of the monster AI complex that Musk is building and how Huang seems to be fawning over Musk and his abilities to force something through and I got a bad feeling. Opposing AI's, living in different realities because they are programmed drastically different, enhancing the divison. Will Elon's budding AI take over gubmnt functions? Would we know if it did?

Generative AI is already helping fact-checkers. But it’s proving less useful in small languages and outside the West | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

The team at MythDetector, a fact-checking platform in Georgia, has also begun experimenting with generative AI. Editor-in-Chief Tamar Kintsurashvili says that artificial intelligence has been helping them detect harmful information that’s spreading on digital platforms through a matching mechanism where they label some content as false and AI is able to find similar false content online.

“When we label some content, then AI finds similar content,” she explains. “Hostile actors have learned how to avoid social networks’ policies so sometimes coordination is achieved not through distribution of content through Facebook pages, but through individuals mobilised by political parties or far-right groups. Since we have access to only the public pages and groups, it's not always easy to identify individuals through social listening tools, such as CrowdTangle.”

It is worth pointing out that Meta announced that it will be shutting down CrowdTangle by August 2024, months before the Georgian election in October. The company said it is replacing the tool with a new Content Library API.

While AI helps them flag content, Kintsurashvili says, they still have to go through it themselves because there’s some mismatching as this tool hasn’t been trained in the Georgian language. “It's saving us time when tools are working properly, but some tools are still in testing mode, and AI fact-checking tools are not very efficient yet, but I’m sure they will improve their efficiency in the future,” she says.