Developers are using artificial intelligence to spot fake news

The animated face of prototype robot GRACE, Graduate Robot Attending Conference, is tested by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Reid Simmons, right, in the lab at the school in Pittsburgh Tuesday, July 9, 2002. It may have been the first bit of fake news in the history of the Internet: in 1984, someone posted on Usenet that the Soviet Union was joining the network. It was a harmless April's Fools Day prank, a far cry from today's weaponized disinformation campaigns and unscrupulous fabrications designed to turn a quick profit. In 2017, misleading and maliciously false online content is so prolific that we humans have little hope of digging ourselves out of the mire. Instead, it looks increasingly likely that the machines will have to save us.