Why Fact-Checking AI Deserves Our Serious Contemplation
Artificial intelligence’s potential to function as an online fact-checker comes with many crucial questions. While all of them cannot be answered in one sitting, each query may impact the future of human communication. Ultimately, the prospect of using AI in a fact-checking capacity deserves the serious contemplation of the American people.
Studying Artificial Intelligence
The current epistemological crisis Americans are experiencing on the internet is turning many minds to AI for a solution. Nathan Lambert, a graduate student at UC Berkely who is set to earn his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences this December, believes that AI will play a vital role in helping humans to repair their relationship with the internet. Lambert explains the need for AI, what the future of the technology might look like, how policy might enable or constrict AI’s applications, and lastly, how he thinks the people who will monitor AI should be chosen.
Nathan Lambert is a Ph.D. student studying Computer Sciences at U.C. Berkeley.
The Need for AI
“I think it’s important to say that AI is not going to be able to determine what is true, and that’s the fundamental conflict,” Lambert explains. While AI might not be the ultimate solution to the epistemological crisis on the internet, Lambert believes that the technology will still be necessary in helping humans monitor the sheer scale of the cyber world.
“Given the scale of internet traffic and the growth,” he says, “it’s fundamentally untractable for humans to do all of it, so some computational tool will be in the loop there.”
Photo from Unsplash user @dnevozhai.
Lambert notes that platforms like Facebook have gotten so big that they have needed to rely on artificial intelligence for quite some time. “On Facebook, for example, [most] of their moderation is already flagged or dealt with by AI,” he explains. “Even if you hire tons of people to do moderation, they cannot. There’s not enough human hours to look at every piece of content and decide is it true or is it hurtful or whatever.”
Facebook is an appropriate example of how large of a task internet moderation really is. According to statistica.com, “During the first quarter of 2021, Facebook reported almost 1.88 billion daily active users.” Combine Facebook’s traffic with the likes of other social media tycoons like Twitter and Instagram, and it is clear to see that no team of humans would be able to monitor the flurry of posts, comments, streams, and tweets.
Lambert reiterates that while the technology is not perfect, AI can still be a valuable aid in the fact-checking arena. “It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s the only solution that’s relatively close,” he says.
An Ideal Scenario
When asked what the best-case scenario might look like for the future of fact-checking AI, Lambert hypothesized that users would be given more control over their internet experience in addition to mitigating the circulation of fake news. He says that AI will help facilitate “a user-controlled curated feed environment and much more stable feedback loops of what content proliferates on algorithms.”
In addition to increased control for users, Lambert also hopes that humans will have “a much better understanding for how these applications work” in the future.
Technology and Policy
Elaborating more on the future, Lambert reasons that much of how AI will be used is contingent upon America’s legislative decisions. “I would guess a lot of it depends on policy,” he says. “There are a lot of anti-trust bills getting done right now, and they’re in their early forms.”
Lambert also anticipates a slow rate of policy change due to how profitable social media platforms have become. “I think some form of legislation will need to happen for the companies to change dramatically,” he explains. “I mean, public perception has changed, but their profitability is so high that it’s like these public companies are not going to do much, and I don’t blame them. They’re making a lot of money.”
Who Will Run Fact-Checking AI?
As Lambert previously noted in his article titled “AI & Arbitration of Truth,” AI won’t be able to fact-check everything down to the first truths of science; this means that someone will be required to plug in that data. The crucial question Lambert asks here is, “who moderates the database?”
When asked who he thinks should be in charge of creating and monitoring the database for AI, Lambert expressed his hopes that the database team will be “more diverse than they likely will be.” He says, “It should probably be way more diverse than just a bunch of computer scientists, so both intellectually and demographically diverse is what I’d say — like sociologists and neuroscientists and maybe even policy experts and people who will think about the political economy of everything.”
AI Deserves Our Serious Contemplation
In his concluding remarks, Lambert hinted towards the enormous impact AI can potentially have and why, for that reason, the subject deserves serious contemplation. “I want to believe,” he says, “but it’s hard to have faith that people will give the thought that is necessary with these kinds of things.”
