Humanity needs you... to build an AI bot that can finger rotten headlines

Two AI researchers are behind a daring open challenge to fight the spread of outrageous headlines that are completely detached from reality. The Fake News Challenge (FNC) is organized by Dean Pomerleau, an entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Delip Rao, an employee at Joostware. The aim is to explore how AI – particularly machine learning and natural language processing – might be used to combat the negative effects of false information. The problem of fake news has been bubbling away for some time, but reached a climax as Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. People were quick to blame dodgy websites for pushing lies – such as the Pope backing Donald – that potentially skewed the election results in the telly celebrity's favor.