Facebook says it wants to help fix the problem of fake news spreading like wildfire on the internet, which it may have helped cause in the first place.
A new AI-powered product called Sphere from Facebook's parent company, Meta was unveiled on Monday. It attempts to make it easier to spot and respond to online "fake news."
According to Meta, this is the first AI model that can instantly examine tens of thousands of citations to verify if they genuinely support the pertinent statements.
The statement follows years of criticism over Facebook's own involvement in fostering and hastening the spread of internet disinformation throughout the world. According to the Meta research team, the Sphere dataset has 134 million publicly accessible web pages.
The collective knowledge of the internet is used to quickly check millions of web citations for mistakes in facts.
Wikipedia is the AI model's first client, which is rather appropriate. Meta's release says that the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia is already using Sphere to scan its pages and flag sources that don't really back up the claims in an entry.
When Sphere finds a questionable source, it will reportedly also recommend a more trustworthy one or a correction to assist improve the entry's accuracy.
Wikipedia has more than 6.5 million entries in the English language alone, and each month, it adds over 17,000 new articles to its pages, according to a statement from Meta.
Wikipedia is typically the first place people look when looking for background knowledge, research information, or a solution to a pop culture-related quandary, according to Meta.
The company also presented a video showing how Sphere works: ---video---
According to Meta, the agreement with Wikipedia does not entail cash remuneration either way. Both Meta and Wikipedia have access to large training grounds for Sphere, which could speed up the process of checking facts on Wikipedia and make it more accurate.
Automated technologies in use at the time could already recognize material that had no citations. However, the intricacy of identifying specific claims with dubious sources and establishing whether those sources genuinely support the assertions at issue "needs an AI system's depth of comprehension and analysis," according to Meta's researchers.
Shani Evenstein Sigalov, a researcher at Tel Aviv University and vice chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, says that the work that Sphere did with Wikipedia is "a convincing example of machine learning technology that may help scale the work of volunteers."
Sigalov said that by enhancing these procedures, "we will be able to draw new contributors to Wikipedia and provide better, more trustworthy information to billions of people across the globe."
Meta's most recent attempt to stop false information on the internet is the launch of Sphere. This may help the company avoid criticism for its own role in letting false information spread.
Users and authorities have frequently criticized Meta over the last several years for the propagation of false material on the firm's social media platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Former employees and internal documents have backed up claims that the company put making money ahead of fighting fake news. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asked to testify before Congress about the issue.
President Joe Biden charged the social media behemoth with "killing lives" for enabling the dissemination of false information about the COVID-19 vaccination on its platforms last summer.
The businesses retaliated, claiming that billions of people were receiving "authoritative information regarding COVID-19 and vaccines" through Facebook and Instagram.