Fake-News Spotter AI Boasts 96 Percent Accuracy
March 8, 2022
A platform developed at the University of São Paulo’s Center for Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry (CeMEAI) could provide a solution to the scourge of online disinformation. ZDNet reports, “Brazilian Academics Create Automated Fake News Detection Platform.” The AI tool analyzes content written in Brazilian Portuguese and has demonstrated an impressive 96% accuracy. Contributing editor Angelica Marl writes:
“In an interview with FAPESP’s news agency, project coordinator and technology transfer director Francisco Louzada Neto said the goal of the project is ‘to offer society an additional tool to identify, not only subjectively, whether a news item is false or not.’ The system uses statistical methods to analyze writing characteristics, such as words used or more frequently used grammatical classes. These are then fed into a machine learning-based classifier, which is able to distinguish patterns of language, vocabulary and semantics of fake and real news, and automatically infer whether the content submitted to the platform is false. The models were trained with a massive database of real and false news and were exposed to the vocabulary used in over 100,000 articles published over the last five years. The researchers will aim to use the false news related to the upcoming presidential elections, as well as content related to the Covid-19 pandemic to further calibrate the models.”
Researchers acknowledge their platform could be used by the writers of fake news to get better at the task, but that is the bane of many tools used to thwart bad actors. Marl tells us the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court just signed agreements with eight of the largest social media platforms to fight disinformation. Perhaps CeMEAI’s creation can help them do just that.
Cynthia Murrell, March 8, 2022
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