Urban legends and outlandish stories often lead 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. Aiming to tackle 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 analyzes Snopes’ collection of information and writes a conversational response. Snopes built Factbot using Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 artificial intelligence model, released earlier this year, in collaboration with California Polytechnic’s Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Of course, AI models are notorious for occasionally offering nonsensical or completely wrong answers that they mind-bogglingly miss. Snopes, which wants to maintain its (sometimes questioned) reputation as a reliable source of facts, had to address that problem. By using Snopes’ databases for its answers, Factbot avoids mind-boggling or outdated answers. All answers include links to the articles used to write them. And if there isn’t enough information to answer the question, FactBot simply tells you that it doesn’t have enough information to respond.
Fun with Factbot
The website sees FactBot as a way to speed up fact-checking not just for its audience but internally as well. The AI chatbot has been incorporated into Snopes’ newsroom to help spot trending topics based on what people are asking. That way, they can research popular topics that Factbot may not be able to answer yet.
“Tracking internet and social media trends will continue, but the chatbot represents an enhancement to Snopes' current outreach flow,” explained Snopes CEO Chris Richmond. “Rather than just monitoring those sources and an inbox of user emails with story ideas, links and questions, staff will also receive responses from the chatbot about what the most frequent conversation topics are, offering a new avenue for story ideas.”
Snopes isn't alone in considering AI chatbots as a tool for answering factual questions. Washington Post He created Climate Answers to do something similar, drawing on his climate journalism to answer questions directly on the topic. These are just the first examples, and they 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 trying to stem the endless stream of misinformation, hoaxes and outright lies.
