Last week, members of the TITAN project met in the birthplace of democracy - Athens - for an innovation meeting. The state-of-the-art project, led by Engineering SpA, is developing AI enabled conversational agents for improving citizens resilience to online disinformation.
TITAN's chatbot will improve peoples critical thinking abilities when it comes to reading information online using the same pedagogical techniques that lifelong resident of Athens, the Greek philosopher Socrates did over 24,000 years ago. People will be supported to ask appropriate questions around online content that stimulates reflective and logical thinking.
Why we need to counter disinformation
The widespread use of information technologies and the increasing accessibility to share information and news has paved the way for new threats to our democratic society. The sharing of false information on social media, even when unintended, is a threat to European values of truth and transparency, harming both individuals and institutions. It is therefore a necessity that people can identify false and misleading information when navigating online and therefore do not inadvertently spread or act on disinformation. As a result everyone should become empowered as citizens of truthful, transparent, democratic societies.
Outcomes of the Innovation meeting
30 project members attended the two-day meeting hosted by the world renown research institute NCSR Demokritos. Participants discussed various options for structuring AI-enabled dialogues and reviewed currently alternatives on the market from linear chat models to the more advanced Chatgpt model.
Challenges encountered in developing the TITAN approach include; how to measure changes in peoples critical thinking abilities?; what type of dialogue structures would be best adopted?; what type of training datasets are needed?; and how to stimulate need and desire for citizen adoption.
As a result of the discussion, first steps were made in the project to:
determine a back-end structure for the TITAN AI-system
understand how to assess and improve critical thinking levels
develop a blueprint for a chatbot thats uses Socratic dialogue to support citizen investigations
To keep up-to-date with progress in TITAN, subscribe using the form at the bottom of the project website TITAN | Fighting disinformation through intelligent coaching (titanthinking.eu)
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