As information reaches people's hands on a daily basis, artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds to counteract the misinformation faced by all those who make use of technology because in digital matters "the biggest problem is that we all consume garbage," said Alex Fink, an expatriate and technology executive from Silicon Valley.
This was pointed out by the creator of the Otherweb platform, who explained that Internet users are daily bombarded by a large amount of "junk" through the various web pages that in turn offer unnecessary content and are part of the daily consumption of all those who surf the net.
A study conducted by Global Web Index GWI revealed that users spend at least 7 hours a day connected to the Internet on all of their devices, while the Global Digital 2022 Report noted that, at the beginning of this year, the number of Internet users reached 4.95 billion.
As a result of the pandemic, the use of social networks increased significantly and platforms such as TikTok began to be one of the most popular among young people and adults, as only at the beginning of this year the users over 18 years of age of this social network were more than 50 percent of all adults in the United States.
"People don't consume billions of pages, they only consume 100 to 200 pages a day. And the way they find these is not random: they typically rely on intermediaries like Google and Facebook and TikTok to select these pages for them," Fink noted.
Fink, who spent 15 years making cameras and computer products, noticed during that time the problems facing society in terms of information and technology, so he began looking for solutions and created Otherweb.
Thus, Otherweb is a platform that seeks to filter information that reaches the hands of users, as well as fake news through a set of artificial intelligence (AI) models.
"The one thing AI excels at is doing things almost as well as a human would. Once that happens, AI wins, because unlike a human, it can be applied on a large scale," Fink noted in an interview for Peninsula 360 Press.
Otherweb seeks that through a "nutritional label" the user decides which website is better to consume information, so that, as a side effect, websites and platforms seek to improve the quality of the information they offer.
The "nutritional label" offered by Otherweb makes an analysis in terms of informativeness, subjectivity, formality, external references, "clickbait" headlines or misleading titles, among other aspects, so the platform created by the technology executive, allows users to search the web free of "garbage", propaganda or extreme partisan bias, because for Fink, "if a small part of the market filters the garbage, there will be less incentive for it to be produced".
"We need the layer between producers and consumers - the middlemen through whom people find the items they end up reading - to reward quality and penalize attention-seeking," Fink said.
Using artificial intelligence to combat "fake news" during election campaigns
During the 2020 presidential elections in the United States, thousands of "fake news" circulated that put the participation of Hispanic American communities in the country at risk, prompting various organizations to call for the disinformation to be stopped.
And for the upcoming mid-term elections in the country to be held in November of this year, the concern about another wave of disinformation -like the one that happened in 2020- has been noted among officials and voters, as the phenomenon has cast doubt on the legitimacy of the victory of presidential candidate Joseph Biden.
Fink also stated that currently, "the percentage of adults who trust the news is 69 percent in Finland; 48 percent in Brazil; 35 percent in Italy; and 26 percent in the United States."
"We don't have data on the Soviet Union, but I think you can guess that it was well below 10 percent. What worries me is that the United States is going in the same direction. So people's decisions about the direction of the country are not loaded to the right or to the left; they're trending downward. And the solution is for them to go up."
Undoubtedly, AI can be of great help in the fight against disinformation, especially in large-scale events such as elections, so using platforms like Otherweb to filter false content can be very useful for all communities to make decisions based on assertive information and you will see, because it is even able to offer articles from the right and left without bias. "The best antidote to this is transparency," said Fink.
Disorders related to excessive use of the Internet
Nowadays, people are exposed to hundreds of websites and platforms that provide information, which has not only revealed the problem of misinformation that exists today, but also the mental health disorders that can arise.
Such is the case of the "accelerated thinking syndrome", which is caused by an excess of information, stress or activities and which Augusto Curry, psychiatrist, in his book "Brilliant Parents, Fascinating Minds" describes as an increase in the speed of thoughts that diminishes the ability to concentrate.
In addition, according to studiesThe constant bombardment of information to which users are exposed has generated pathologies such as stress, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and eating disorders.
How many of us have not felt anxious after a few hours of being exposed to the information circulating on social networks and websites? Or how many of us have not lost the ability to concentrate on our daily activities due to the excess of content we consume?
"If you give people a long-form podcast - even if it's 3 hours long - the same people who seemed to have an attention deficit five minutes ago are somehow transformed into deep thinkers who crave knowledge. I think the obvious conclusion is that consumers are not the root cause of this trend," Fink stressed.
Fink hopes that in the future, writers and publishers will use the AI models offered by Otherweb to improve the quality of the content they offer, and that search engines and social networks will decide what content to promote and, ultimately, readers will be able to choose what content is worth consuming.
"Consumers react to what they encounter in their environment. If you give them deep thoughts, they will act like deep thinkers," Fink concluded.
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