Urban legends and bizarre 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 tackling misinformation, FactBot uses Snopes’ archive and generative AI to answer questions without having to sift through articles using more traditional search methods.
When you ask a question, FactBot goes through Snopes’ collection of information and writes a conversational response. Snopes built Factbot using Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 AI model, released earlier this year, in partnership with California Polytechnic’s Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Of course, AI models are notorious for occasionally giving nonsensical or outright wrong answers that they hallucinate. Snopes, which is keen to maintain its (sometimes contested) reputation as a reliable source of facts, had to address that problem. By using Snopes’ databases for its answers, Factbot avoids hallucinations or outdated answers.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.
Factbot fun
The site sees FactBot as a way to speed up fact-checking, not just for the public, but also internally. The AI chatbot has been incorporated into Snopes’ newsroom to spot trending topics based on what people are asking. That way, they can explore popular topics that FactBot may not yet be able to answer.
“Monitoring internet and social media trends will continue, but the chatbot is an improvement over Snopes’ current contact flow,” said Chris Richmond, CEO of Snopes. explained“Instead of just monitoring those sources and an inbox full of emails from users with story ideas, links, and questions, agents also hear from the chatbot what the most common conversation topics are, creating a new pipeline for story ideas.”
Snopes isn’t alone in seeing AI chatbots as a tool to answer factual questions. Washington Post created Climate Answers to do something similar, relying on its climate journalism to answer questions about the topic directly. 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 the effort to make the internet a reliable source of information, or at the very least, in the effort to stem the endless stream of misinformation, jokes, and outright lies.