Meta has had a lot to do with disinformation in recent months, but this does not mean that it is not interested in the truthfulness of the contents circulating on the Net. Quite the contrary. In fact, the company recently presented Sphere, Meta’s AI designed to limit the spread of fake news. Not surprisingly, the first customer will be Wikipedia. The platform, in fact, will use the tool to scan the pages and verify that the contributions provided by users are actually valid. But let’s find out how it will work in more detail.
Spere: Meta launches an AI that will check the validity of Wikipedia entries
At present Wikipedia matters 6.5 million entries, and sees an average of about 17,000 articles added each month. Adding and editing content is in crowdsourcing, as we know. But although there is a team of collaborators who take care of the supervision, it is clear that it is not easy to check the validity of all the content posted by users. Precisely for this reason, Wikipedia has chosen to be the first platform to make use of the functionality of Sphere, Meta’s AI designed to combat disinformation. In this way, the platform makes sure that the content it offers to users is verifiedso as to avoid the spread of false news.
Credits: Meta
To train Artificial Intelligence and make it functional for this assignment, Meta created “a new dataset (WAFER) of 4 million Wikipedia citations, significantly more intricate than ever for this type of research”. On the other hand, as reported by the company: “Our next step is to form models to evaluate the quality of the documents recovered, detect potential contradictions, prioritize more reliable sources. And if there is no convincing evidence, admit that they, like us, may still be perplexed. ” In the specific case of Wikipedia, Meta’s Sphere is used for scan user contributions and verify that they have some network support.
“If a quote seems irrelevant, our model will suggest a more applicable source, also pointing to the specific passage that supports the claim,” the company reports. “Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform to help Wikipedia editors systematically identify citation problems, and quickly correct the citation. Or correct the content of the corresponding article on a large scale “. In short, limiting false news will be Sphere’s mission, it is evident.