MIT CSAIL's AI can detect fake news and political bias

Fake news continues to rear its ugly head; in March of this year, half of the U.S. population reported seeing deliberately misleading articles on news websites. A majority of respondents to a recent Edelman survey, meanwhile, said that they couldn't judge the veracity of media reports. And given that fake news has been shown to spread faster than real news, it's no surprise that almost seven in ten people are concerned it might be used as a "weapon." Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute believe they've engineered a partial solution. In a study that'll be presented later this month at the 2018 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference in Brussels, Belgium, they describe an artificially intelligent (AI) system that can determine whether a source is accurate or politically prejudiced.