(ETH) – Move over Facebook, You aren’t the only one that is using AI and algorithms to combat “disinformation” and “fake news”. A new software tool that is being developed for the U.S. Air Force and Special Operations Command, or SOCOM will be created to combat “misinformation” from spreading.
“If you don’t compete in the information space, regardless of how good your operations are, your activities are, you will probably eat a s*** sandwich of disinformation or false reporting later on,” this statement was made recently in an interview by Raymond “Tony” Thomas, who is a former SOCOM chief,
“We certainly experienced that at the tactical level. That was the epiphany where we would have good raids, good strikes, etc. and the bad guys would spin it so fast that we would be eating collateral damage claims, etc. So the information space in that very tactical space is key. It even “stretches to the strategic space,” said Thomas, warning that disinformation can continue to spread until it affects larger geopolitical realities.
Thomas now serves as an advisory board member for Primer, which is a company that recently announced a Small Business Innovation Research contract that is developing software over the next year to help analysts survey the information landscape and quickly detect false narratives that show up in the public space.
This technology will be able to scan large amounts of text and extract themes and other information based on the frequency and prominence of words and phrases. According to Defense One, “It’s the sort of thing that can be very useful if you have a lot of text you want to very quickly summarize in an accurate headline, a capability they demonstrate here.
To train their headline-writing neural net, they used a corpus “of millions of publicly available document-title pairs: news articles and headlines” according to their paper on the subject.” This platform will be able “to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation,”
