Run the Pipeline
Pick a claim. A cube carries it through four stations: extract → retrieve → score sources → verdict. The verdict lamp at the end turns green (supported), amber (needs context), or red (refuted). Drag to orbit.
drag to rotate
1. Claim extraction — speech-to-text, then an LLM isolates checkable factual statements from opinion.
2. Evidence retrieval — search across encyclopedias, journals, fact-check databases (ClaimReview).
3. Source scoring — weight by reliability, recency, independence of sources.
4. Verdict + citation — supported / refuted / needs-context, with links.
Select a claim to begin
The verdicts, explained
- Eiffel Tower — TRUE. Thermal expansion: iron expands ~12 µm per metre per °C. A 300 m iron tower across a ~20–25°C seasonal swing grows roughly 7.5–15 cm. Physics textbooks and the tower's own operator confirm it.
- 10% of the brain — FALSE. fMRI and PET imaging show virtually all brain regions active over a day; damage to "unused" 90% would be harmless, yet no brain region can be lost without consequence. A myth traced to early-1900s self-help marketing.
- Coffee stunts growth — FALSE. Longitudinal studies (e.g., 81 adolescents tracked 6 years, published in JAMA-family journals) found no bone-growth difference. The myth came from early-1900s Postum cereal-drink advertising.
- Great Wall from the Moon — FALSE. At ~384,000 km, the Wall (max ~9 m wide) subtends far below human visual acuity — like seeing a hair from 3 km away. Astronauts confirm: not visible even from low Earth orbit without aid.
Where AI fact-checkers fail (and how to compensate)
- Fresh events: retrieval lags breaking news by hours; early "verdicts" often flip. Treat anything under 24 hours old as provisional.
- Checkable ≠ true/false: many viral claims are framing ("the economy is failing") — no pipeline can verdict a vibe. Good tools label these "opinion," bad ones guess.
- Circular sourcing: if 50 articles all trace to one press release, that's one source. Station 3 (independence scoring) is the hardest to automate.
- Your move — lateral reading: professional fact-checkers open new tabs and check who is behind the source before reading the source. Stanford studies found this single habit beats checklist methods dramatically.
Rule of thumb: use AI fact-checkers as a first-pass radar, not a judge. When a verdict surprises you, click through to the cited primary source before repeating it.