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Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

factful.io

11–20 of 163 posts

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#12
post #10

Despite what criticisms you may receive, you put something into existence. You may not have gotten everything right but, it is admirable. Congratulations. At your age, many of your detractors probably didn’t do something so bold. Keep with it.

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#15
Does this do more than send the text to ChatGPT concatenated with a prompt like "fact check this essay, putting your notes between brackets"?

Nothing happens when I click "fact check" so it's very hard to evaluate.

Also from your ToS:

> You may not modify, reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works based upon the Service, in whole or in part, without our prior written consent.

Can I even send my fact-checked document to anyone?

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#16
post #9

Love the initiative Andrew ... PM me. You have some glaring security issues on your app you might want to know about. edit: i'll email you at andrew@factful.io

Yea thank you! We will fix it.

np .. you should change all those fast ... you never know if someone got a hold of them already.

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#17
Andrew, you and your friends should be proud. It's really encouraging to see people, especially in your generation, thinking seriously about the problem of misinformation. There are fundamental challenges you all will face in this idea:

- most current LLMs are trained on large amounts of web data that itself contains facts, opinions, and misinformation. These things are treated equally, so I would expect the LLM to get common facts right, but also to represent opinions or misinformation as facts when they are pervasive.

- LLMs "hallucinate" and tend not to know when to say "I don't know" or to not try to fact-check something that is not factual in nature.

...in short, I would expect LLMs to be an unreliable fact checker, which has the potential to do as much harm as good.

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#19
post #9

Love the initiative Andrew ... PM me. You have some glaring security issues on your app you might want to know about. edit: i'll email you at andrew@factful.io

You might want to remove these comments now to not give ppl ideas.

Re: Show HN: I'm 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

#20
post #17

Andrew, you and your friends should be proud. It's really encouraging to see people, especially in your generation, thinking seriously about the problem of misinformation. There are fundamental challenges you all will face in this idea: - most current LLMs are trained on large amounts of web data that itself contains facts, opinions, and misinformation. These things are treated equally, so I would expect the LLM to g…

Thinking out loud... I don't think these problems can be solved. If you are going to do it anyway, I would suggest:

- Using a RAG architecture on top of a database of factual information. Wikipedia is probably your best bet. It is not 100% factual or correct either, but maybe as good as it gets. Scaling RAG to wikipedia size is not trivial, but I think it can be done.

- Prompting the LLM to cite its sources so people can fact-check the fact-checker

- Prompting the LLM to say it is unsure when something does not have a clear answer. I don't expect this to be reliable, but maybe somewhat better

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