Snopes Launches FactBot: AI Tool for Real-Time Fact-Checking

Snopes, in collaboration with programmers from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched FactBot, an AI-driven tool designed to fact-check questions in real time. After months of development and fine-tuning, FactBot offers up-to-date, reliable answers while citing its sources directly from the Snopes archives.

How FactBot Works

Unlike many AI models that may provide outdated or incorrect information, FactBot is specifically built to address these issues. When users enter queries like “Is Bigfoot real?” or “Is the house in Home Alone a real house in Illinois?” FactBot searches the extensive 30-year Snopes archive and delivers answers, along with the sources where the information was found.

Addressing AI’s Common Pitfalls

One of the common challenges with AI tools like ChatGPT is their tendency to "hallucinate" — meaning they generate answers that are incorrect yet sound plausible. Moreover, these AI models are trained on data from the past, making their information potentially outdated. FactBot tackles these issues by providing up-to-date information and verifying its accuracy against trusted sources in the Snopes database.

Building the FactBot: A Collaborative Effort

FactBot is the result of a partnership between Snopes, Cal Poly, and AWS. The team used Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 model (released June 25, 2024) to power the AI tool. Previous AI models were found to be too slow or inaccurate, but Sonnet 3.5 met all requirements for speed, accuracy, and sustainability.

The project utilized RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), allowing the Snopes archive to support the AI model. Each article was converted into vectors using the titan-embed-text-v2 model, and stored in OpenSearch. When users enter a question, FactBot performs a similarity search across these vectors, retrieves relevant articles, and runs the responses through a final quality check before delivering an answer.

Energy Efficiency and Sustainability

The chosen approach is more energy-efficient than retraining a large language model every time Snopes publishes a new article. This allows the team to update the model with newer versions of Sonnet when available without straining resources or incurring excessive costs.

How to Use FactBot

FactBot is free and available to everyone, although users are limited to a few queries per day unless they sign up for a free account. These accounts help support Snopes’ journalism by allowing the platform to serve more relevant ads to registered users. You can sign up for a free account here.

As the popularity of FactBot grows, Snopes may impose further limits on free accounts to manage the processing power required for AI tools, but for now, FactBot remains accessible to all.

A New Source of Story Ideas for Snopes

Beyond helping users, FactBot also represents a new way for Snopes’ dedicated fact-checkers to monitor internet trends. The chatbot will not only assist with answering frequent questions but will also alert staff to trending topics, creating a valuable pipeline for future story ideas.

Although this article was originally published in July 2024 by Snopes, we felt it was important to share now due to its relevance and impact on AI-driven fact-checking technology.