Can artificial intelligence solve the internet's fake news problem? | Popular Science

The media has churned out hopeful ­coverage about how AI efforts may save us from bogus headlines. But what’s inside those ­digital brains? How will algorithms do their work? Artificial intelligence, after all, performs best when following strict rules. So yeah, we can teach computers to play chess or Go. But because facts are slippery, Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, is not an AI optimist. “The concept of a fact-checking algorithm, at least at first blush, is to compare a statement to what is known truth,” she says. “Since there’s no artificial algorithmic model for truth, it’s just not going to work.”

That means computer scientists have to build one. So just how are they constructing their army of virtual fact-checkers? What are their models of truth? And how close are we to entrusting their algorithms to cull fake news? To find out, the editors at Popular Science asked me to try out an automated fact-checker, using a piece of fake news, and compare its process to my own. The results were mixed, but maybe not for the reasons you (or at least I) would have thought.