31–40 of 163 posts
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…
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 d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal is admirable. But "fact checking" is complicated and intelligent people can disagree. And a lot of people understand that having a centralized source of "truth" isn't desirable. The mathematical disciplines have proofs. That is, "facts" that are attained by deduction. Science can be rigorous, but it isn't driven through proofs. Science is empirical. A lot of the time, scientific research is not accessible an…
A core part of the problem is a lack of trust in institutions. People feel the experts aren't experts, feel the experts lie, or feel the experts have different and sometimes malicious goals. Even if that weren't the case new institutions should be less trusted than those with a solid history. So this new institution is trying to convince people of things. Why would my flat-earther coworker believe factful.io when the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A core part of the problem is a lack of trust in institutions. People feel the experts aren't experts, feel the experts lie, or feel the experts have different and sometimes malicious goals. Even if that weren't the case new institutions should be less trusted than those with a solid history. So this new institution is trying to convince people of things. Why would my flat-earther coworker believe factful.io when the…
Sometimes I hear about nutrition/food studies done in academia which were funded by big food corporations. It's probably also common in the medical field to have big pharma doing the sponsoring. I don't disagree with you. Lack of trust is a problem in some ways. But I've also become used to the idea that determining truth includes scrutinizing the source. It really is a lot of work.
I once worked with a conspiracy theory believer who thought that the Earth was simultaneously a flat disk and a hollow sphere. This person wasn't obviously a fool in normal conversation. They had no trouble writing C++, they had a master's degree in math, they recently purchased a second house and we're doing the repairs themselves to flip it, and he was comfortable with writing SQL for the application we're working in.
But he absolutely refused to believe that "they" weren't out to get him. In retrospect it was clear that this was likely standing from anti-Semitic conspiracy backgrounds but more than once I asked him to verify if he meant actual lizard people or if that was code for something, and with great conviction he told me he actually believes some of our leaders were lizards.
This person fundamentally didn't trust our institutions. He thought at the Airlines and that the government were being headed by literal lizard people in human suits. He had access to all the evidence to the contrary, but he had been betrayed so many times by the government that he saw no reason to trust anything from them and refused any photographs I produced from NASA.
No how hard I worked to produce and vet information citing sources, or even produce experiments that he can reproduce, he just wouldn't trust anything that appeared to line up with what he perceived to be the goals of the government.
Worse, something so many people attached to reality deny is that people like him are common. I fully believe that one in three Americans are as delusional as this guy at least some of the time.
How do you expect a language model to see through propaganda and other large-scale misinformation by power/money with a megaphone?
How do you expect a computer program that can't reliably determine what letter a word starts with to determine objective truth?
I appreciate that you have a passion for the subject, but this tool is fundamentally unable to do what you wish it to do. If your goal is to make money -- keep going forward. Big promises built on lies have made many tech billionaires. If your goal is to combat misinformation you'd be better served by doing it in a different way than relying on a machine.
If you're building this at sixteen you have no limits. Don't take this as discouragement towards building things -- take it as a warning against cybernetic totalism. Make the world a better place not through technology that tells humans how to be or how things are; make the world a better place by building technology that adapts itself it human needs. Maybe even build technology that needs humans more than the humans need the technology.
I stopped reading here because LLMs do not deal in facts. LLMs are statistical models of the relationships between words. An LLM can regurgitate facts that appear in its training data, but they are incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction.
You cannot trust anything output by an LLM to be factual; it always needs to be verified. Therefore, LLMs are unsuited to fact-checking.
I'm not saying this to be a dick. I'm trying to warn you against investing a lot of time and energy into something that just doesn't work the way people want it to.
That said, at 16 you’re just learning, and literally whatever you accomplish will be a great achievement, so go down these paths and learn your lessons
I admire your bravery of posting to something like HN for people to pick at it (there are always positives and negatives)... Personally, I think there are a number of hard questions to answer surrounding fact checking, it might be wise to get advice from experienced people in fact checking (I have no idea what it is called, but I think that is an entire field). No big deal, but it raises my curiosity, why are you loc…
We are incorporated in the UK because it is the only place that allows 16 year olds to do so. For the businesses, we still aren't done the features yet but we would charge by query for API and by user for the subscription.