In the fight against fake news, artificial intelligence is waging a battle it cannot win

It's become clear that the algorithms Facebook and Google designed to deliver news to their users have failed. But while fake news is a headache for those tech giants right now, the underlying research question--whether and how machines tell truth from lies on the internet--is one that will persist as long as the world wide web stays an open forum. Facebook and Google's sizable machine learning divisions have created algorithms that effectively surface information that users want to see. But they've been unable to actually understand or vet that info--and in fact, experts across the tech industry say it's unrealistic to expect any AI or machine learning algorithm to do this task well. All our best efforts so far are built on research in natural language processing, which teaches AI to read a piece of text, understand the concepts within, and provide insight about its meaning. "Modern machine learning for natural language processing is able to do things like translate from one language to another, because everything it needs to know is in the sentence its processing," says Ian Goodfellow, a researcher at OpenAI.