Urban legends and outlandish stories often send people to Snopes in search of a reality check. Now, the fact-checking site has an AI tool called FactBot to help you win a bet about Bigfoot or confirm a story about your favorite celebrity. Aimed at addressing misinformation, FactBot uses Snopes' archive and generative AI to answer questions without having to comb through articles using more traditional search methods.
When you ask a question, FactBot goes through Snopes' collection of information and writes a conversational answer. Snopes built Factbot using Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 AI model released earlier this year, working with California Polytechnic's Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Of course, AI models are famous for occasionally offering nonsensical or outright wrong answers they hallucinate. Snopes, being keen to keep up its (sometimes contested) reputation as a reliable source of facts, had to address that issue. By keeping to Snopes' databases for its responses, Factbot avoids hallucinations or obsolete answers. All of the answers include links to the articles used to compose them. And if there's not enough information to answer the question, FactBot just tells you that it doesn't have enough information to respond.
Factbot Fun
The website sees FactBot as a way of speeding up fact-checking not just for its audience but internally. The AI chatbot has been incorporated into Snopes' newsroom to help spot trending topics based on what people are asking. That way, they can pursue popular topics that Factbot may not be able to answer yet.
"Monitoring internet and social media trends will continue, but the chatbot represents an improvement to Snopes' current contact flow," Snopes CEO Chris Richmond explained. "Instead of only monitoring those sources and an inbox of emails from users with story ideas, links, and questions, staff will also hear back from the chatbot on what the most frequent topics of conversation are, offering a new story-idea pipeline."
Snopes isn't unique in seeing AI chatbots as a tool for answering questions about facts. The Washington Post created Climate Answers to do something similar, relying on its climate journalism to answer questions directly on the topic. These are only the early examples and almost certainly won't be the last. As AI technology continues to develop, tools like FactBot are likely to play an increasingly important role in trying to make the internet a reliable source of information, or at least in attempting to tamp down on the endless flood of misinformation, pranks, and outright lies.
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