New Way Now: Full Fact transforms health misinformation monitoring with Google Cloud in record time
10Summary: Kate Wilkinson is a senior product manager at Full Fact, a UK-based organization that has been combating misinformation for over a decade. As a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners, they find, expose, and counter the harm it does. The technological tools they develop have been utilized by 45 teams across 26 countries.
Challenge: Health misinformation can have devastating consequences, such as promoting harmful treatments, and fueling unnecessary fear. This misinformation not only endangers lives but also burdens healthcare systems, costing countries millions daily, according to research conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As more people rely on the internet for health information, the need for large-scale fact-checking becomes critical in ensuring that communities have access to accurate, potentially life-saving information.
Solution: With gen AI, Full Fact developed a tool that can analyze and summarize large volumes of health content, reducing fact checkers’ workload to a more manageable scale.
Results: By leveraging the power of Google's Gemini model to do the heavy lifting for fact-checkers, Full Fact can accomplish what would otherwise take 10,000 hours of monitoring and surface the most harmful content in just a fraction of the time. This swiftly counters the spread of misinformation, minimizing its harmful impact on public health and, ultimately, saving lives.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Kate Wilkinson, senior product manager at Full Fact:
→ “AI and generative AI presents an unprecedented opportunity to address some of humanity's most pressing challenges at a level that we can't do as individuals. We have limits — limits of resources, of team size, of time — but with AI and generative AI, we're able to surpass those limits.”
→ “We want to make sure that when it comes to fact-checking, fact-checkers are using their time efficiently. Our prototype can run 24/7, monitoring claims across platforms to identify the most harmful claims.”
→ “Without AI, we don't stand a chance in the fight against health misinformation at a global scale.”
→ “We're now able to take what would've been tens of thousands of hours of manual monitoring of online video for health misinformation and do it in a fraction of the time with Google Cloud.”
Google Cloud products used: Full Fact is using Gemini Pro. They are also experimenting with Gemini Flash, and exploring Gemma for downloadable models.
Learn more:
→ AI For Social Good ebook https://goo.gle/gen-ai-for-social-good