AI Tools and Disinformation

June 2024 update:
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to see my current work at Substack.
That work is a continuation of the articles here
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Original: 11/01/21
Revised: no

One of the most pressing issues with AI right now is the use of AI to falsify things, complemented by the lack of AI tools to provide effective deterrents against disinformation. This pressing concern has acquired significantly more weight with the propagation of disinformation and conspiracy theories centered around two things, both in 2020. First, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was not lawfully won by Joe Biden. Second, the disinformation about covid vaccines and potential therapeutic treatments. Both have been debunked repeatedly by the most authoritative organizations and by the professionals who have been directly involved with the security of the elections or the safety of the vaccines. Both are dangerously corrosive to our collective well-being and they show that the biggest threats facing the US right now are not external.

Any progress in this area of AI (combating disinformation), being central to our future well-being, is to be commended. Social media especially has been used for making claims that are tortured at best, misleading on average, and dangerous at worst. People often wonder if posted claims can be verified expeditiously and effectively. Neural networks have awesome performance for fact verification, but do it only in a black-box fashion, giving Yes/No answers, without explainability. But Yes/No without explanations would not work, people need to see why, so explanations must be given, and they must be given in natural language.

On the other hand we do have formal (mathematical) proof assistants that can output the full array of deductions for a given factual sentence relative to a knowledge domain, but they are extremely slow. So we need systems that combine these two techniques. ProoFVer is a fact verification system based on natural logic, with explainability and good performance. It is joint work between the University of Cambridge and Facebook. As of now, these systems are only used to assist humans with fact verification. But time will come when they will do it all, without humans in the decision loop.

Here is an article about ProoFVer: Cambridge U & Facebook’s ProoFVer: High-Performance Natural Logic-Based Fact Verification With Explainability. And a much longer discussion about disinformation and some ways to combat it, keeping in mind that AI tools are becoming the tools of preference with which to sow disinformation: