Andrew, you and your friends should be proud. It's really encouraging to see people, especially in your generation, thinking seriously about the problem of misinformation. There are fundamental challenges you all will face in this idea:
- most current LLMs are trained on large amounts of web data that itself contains facts, opinions, and misinformation. These things are treated equally, so I would expect the LLM to get common facts right, but also to represent opinions or misinformation as facts when they are pervasive.
- LLMs "hallucinate" and tend not to know when to say "I don't know" or to not try to fact-check something that is not factual in nature.
...in short, I would expect LLMs to be an unreliable fact checker, which has the potential to do as much harm as good.
- most current LLMs are trained on large amounts of web data that itself contains facts, opinions, and misinformation. These things are treated equally, so I would expect the LLM to get common facts right, but also to represent opinions or misinformation as facts when they are pervasive.
- LLMs "hallucinate" and tend not to know when to say "I don't know" or to not try to fact-check something that is not factual in nature.
...in short, I would expect LLMs to be an unreliable fact checker, which has the potential to do as much harm as good.