Acorn AI

Inspiration

This idea started when I was looking at different news posts about the recent wars and conflicts were happeing and relizeing how much misinformation is spreading to ordinary indiviuals. So for my YOUtopia I wanted to build a solution for this.

What it does

Acorn AI sits quietly in your browser and watches pages as you browse. When it finds text that looks AI generated it highlights it, and when you click it you get a quick breakdown of why it got flagged. There's also an Inspect button that lets you fact-check anything on the page if something feels off. It can also pull info on the website that you are using based off of AI insights and other user experiences.

How we built it

I used vanilla JS and built it as a Chrome extension. We did this by getting the DOM of the website at all time and scanning it. I also used browser caching to reduce AI tokens. For the AI detection we used Groq free tier models like Ollamma we also built a little squirrel mascot because why not.

Challenges we ran into

Injecting highlights into pages without accidentally destroying the layout was way harder than we expected. Some sites really don't like you touching their DOM. Also figuring out how to make API calls efficiently without hitting rate limits every 30 seconds took a while. I switched to multiple different providers before getting it right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It actually works on real pages ANY PAGE. Like genuinely flags AI content on live sites. That moment when it first lit up correctly felt pretty great.

What we learned

A lot about how Chrome extensions actually work under the hood the service worker and content script setup is not as straightforward as it looks. Also learned a ton about prompting models to return clean structured JSON consistently. Also figuring out which AI provider to use so we can test this out for the hackathon for free.

What's next for Acorn AI

I want to add image detection, build out a site trust score over time, and eventually let users contribute flags so it becomes a community-powered tool.

Built With

• antigravity
• chrome-extensions-(manifest-v3)
• css
• gemini-2.0-flash
• html
• javascript
• llama-3.3-70b
• openrouter-api