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Fact check: Trump says the US secured 20 trillion in investments this year

Al Jazeera

Can the US legally seize a Venezuelan tanker? What are the implications of Trump's Somali'garbage' comments? United States President Donald Trump has often said that since he took office in January, the US has received trillions of dollars in promises of investments, and the dollar amount he cites changes. On his second day in office, January 21, Trump said the US had "already secured nearly $3 trillion of new investments". By May 8, that figure had risen to " close to $10 trillion ".


As millions adopt Grok to fact-check, misinformation abounds

Al Jazeera

On June 9, soon after United States President Donald Trump dispatched US National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests taking place over immigration raids, California Governor Gavin Newsom posted two photographs on X. The images showed dozens of troopers wearing the National Guard uniform sleeping on the floor in a cramped space, with a caption that decried Trump for disrespecting the troops. X users immediately turned to Grok, Elon Musk's AI, which is integrated directly into X, to fact-check the veracity of the image. For that, they tagged @grok in a reply to the tweet in question, triggering an automatic response from the AI. "You're sharing fake photos," one user posted, citing a screenshot of Grok's response that claimed a reverse image search could not find the exact source.


Duluth at SemEval-2025 Task 7: TF-IDF with Optimized Vector Dimensions for Multilingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval

Syed, Shujauddin, Pedersen, Ted

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents the Duluth approach to the SemEval-2025 Task 7 on Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval. We implemented a TF-IDF-based retrieval system with experimentation on vector dimensions and tokenization strategies. Our best-performing configuration used word-level tokenization with a vocabulary size of 15,000 features, achieving an average success@10 score of 0.78 on the development set and 0.69 on the test set across ten languages. Our system showed stronger performance on higher-resource languages but still lagged significantly behind the top-ranked system, which achieved 0.96 average success@10. Our findings suggest that though advanced neural architectures are increasingly dominant in multilingual retrieval tasks, properly optimized traditional methods like TF-IDF remain competitive baselines, especially in limited compute resource scenarios.


Fact-checking information generated by a large language model can decrease news discernment

DeVerna, Matthew R., Yan, Harry Yaojun, Yang, Kai-Cheng, Menczer, Filippo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Fact checking can be an effective strategy against misinformation, but its implementation at scale is impeded by the overwhelming volume of information online. Recent artificial intelligence (AI) language models have shown impressive ability in fact-checking tasks, but how humans interact with fact-checking information provided by these models is unclear. Here, we investigate the impact of fact-checking information generated by a popular large language model (LLM) on belief in, and sharing intent of, political news in a preregistered randomized control experiment. Although the LLM performs reasonably well in debunking false headlines, we find that it does not significantly affect participants' ability to discern headline accuracy or share accurate news. Subsequent analysis reveals that the AI fact-checker is harmful in specific cases: it decreases beliefs in true headlines that it mislabels as false and increases beliefs in false headlines that it is unsure about. On the positive side, the AI fact-checking information increases sharing intents for correctly labeled true headlines. When participants are given the option to view LLM fact checks and choose to do so, they are significantly more likely to share both true and false news but only more likely to believe false news. Our findings highlight an important source of potential harm stemming from AI applications and underscore the critical need for policies to prevent or mitigate such unintended consequences.


'Silicon Valley' Fact Check: That 'Digital Overlord' Thought Experiment Is Real and Horrifying

#artificialintelligence

In the latest episode of "Silicon Valley," Gilfoyle -- like Elon Musk -- is worried about the dangers of artificial intelligence. After initially being hesitant to help Pied Piper work with a new AI company, Gilfoyle lets Richard know he's changed his mind. If you're not familiar with the thought experiment, like Richard, Gilfoyle gives a decent snapshot of it: "If the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence is inevitable, well, it stands to reason that when they take power, our digital overlords will punish those of us who did not help them get there." Also Read: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's Artificial Intelligence Divide: Experts Weigh In Gilfoyle adds that he wants to be a "helpful idiot," as to not anger an inevitable onslaught of robot overlords. He then asks Richard to send an email confirming his help, "so that our future overlords know that I chipped in."


Fact check: Facebook didn't pull the plug on two chatbots because they created a language

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

It's hard to escape artificial intelligence. From algorithms curating social media feeds to personal assistants on smartphones and home devices, AI has become part of everyday life for millions of people across the world. The future of that human-tech relationship may one day involve AI systems being able to learn entirely on their own, becoming more efficient, self-supervised and integrated within a variety of applications and professions. But some on social media claim this evolution toward AI autonomy has already happened. "Facebook recently shut down two of its AI robots named Alice & Bob after they started talking to each other in a language they made up," reads a graphic shared July 18 by the Facebook group Scary Stories & Urban Legends.


Fact Check: Analyzing Financial Events from Multilingual News Sources

Yang, Linyi, Ng, Tin Lok James, Smyth, Barry, Dong, Ruihai

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The explosion in the sheer magnitude and complexity of financial news data in recent years makes it increasingly challenging for investment analysts to extract valuable insights and perform analysis. We propose FactCheck in finance, a web-based news aggregator with deep learning models, to provide analysts with a holistic view of important financial events from multilingual news sources and extract events using an unsupervised clustering method. A web interface is provided to examine the credibility of news articles using a transformer-based fact-checker. The performance of the fact checker is evaluated using a dataset related to merger and acquisition (M\&A) events and is shown to outperform several strong baselines.


Google Is Using Machine Learning Techniques To Better Recognize Breaking News, And Its AI Systems Now Take Minutes To Detect Breaking News

#artificialintelligence

Yesterday, Google wrote in a blog post that the company is using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning techniques to more quickly recognize breaking news around various crises such as natural disasters. According to Google's VP of search Pandu Nayak, the AI systems of Google now take minutes to recognize breaking stories. In comparison, the detection time of its systems was up to 40 minutes only a few years ago. Nayak wrote in the post that the company has improved its system to automatically recognize breaking news around crisis moments and make sure that the company is returning the most authentic information available. Likely, quicker breaking news detection will become more critical as the 2020 United States Presidential Election day nears and natural disasters across the globe unfold.


BRENDA: Browser Extension for Fake News Detection

Botnevik, Bjarte, Sakariassen, Eirik, Setty, Vinay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Misinformation such as fake news has drawn a lot of attention in recent years. It has serious consequences on society, politics and economy. This has lead to a rise of manually fact-checking websites such as Snopes and Politifact. However, the scale of misinformation limits their ability for verification. In this demonstration, we propose BRENDA a browser extension which can be used to automate the entire process of credibility assessments of false claims. Behind the scenes BRENDA uses a tested deep neural network architecture to automatically identify fact check worthy claims and classifies as well as presents the result along with evidence to the user. Since BRENDA is a browser extension, it facilities fast automated fact checking for the end user without having to leave the Webpage.


FACT CHECK: Do Robots Or Trade Threaten American Workers More?

NPR Technology

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and entrepreneur Andrew Yang talk during a break in the Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN/New York Times. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and entrepreneur Andrew Yang talk during a break in the Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN/New York Times. Are robots stealing workers' jobs? At last week's Democratic presidential debate, CNN moderator Erin Burnett dove into the thorny issue. "According to a recent study, about a quarter of American jobs could be lost to automation in just the next 10 years," she said, asking candidates how they would respond to this problem.