PROVE ME WRONG

Can AI do fact-checking? A WIRED fact-checker fact-checks.

- BY MEGHAN HERBST

NEARLY HALF OF Americans say they use AI to find information and generate ideas.

It’s not hard to see why. As social media devolves into slop—and Google into a glorified landing page for Reddit threads and content farms—most of us are starved for something reliable. Plus, chatbots are so helpful, aren’t they? The first time I interacted with one, I asked if it knew it was a huge drain on resources. Half an hour later, I had a new recipe for vegan cream cheese.

I never tried the recipe. Instead, I found a human-created one that the LLM might have scraped. That’s the way these models work, of course. They repackage collective knowledge into something that feels tailored to you. This may be OK for dairy alternatives (unless you’re a vegan blogger). But on the order of the world, and truth—the focus of my role as a fact-checker at WIRED—the stakes are exponentially higher.

Over the past year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity. Surely a fact-checker at a magazine isn’t long for this AI-upgraded world. Call me foolish, but I’m not that worried. Very little of humanity’s collective knowledge, I’ve concluded, lives on the internet. And according to my research, AI is even more wrong than people might think.

TOM WOLFE EVIDENTLY thought of fact-checkers, according to the writer Colin Dickey, as a “cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.” As definitions go, it’s not bad (though my boss and many colleagues are men). What can I say? It’s our job, unlike AI’s, to be annoying.