Cut The Bullsh!t

AI-powered fact-checking helping the world fight misinformation, one bullsh!t claim at a time!

Comment

Try it out! Login with the following details: email: trymeout@thanks.com password: thanksforsussing I will do my best to keep this loaded up on tokens, but please try and be conscious and not use too many up so that everyone can try it out! Would love any feedback/additional features you think would be cool. (Judges - I will provide you with a seperate account for testing with in the comment section of additional info)

Inspiration

My inspiration for this project came as I was watching my social feed fill up with AI generated videos and political propaganda. I have felt for a while that the truth is becoming harder and harder to discern with each passing day and it honestly scares me. I wanted to create an application that could drive the community to collaborate together to fight misinformation. The ultimate goal is to create a user base large enough to directly influence googles SEO such that highly bullshit pages get buried while genuine, truthful reporting gets elevated.

What it does

The application is composed on two main parts. The web app is a PWA that can be downloaded on both desktop and phone for quick access. It allows users to directly type claims they want fact checked, or upload url's to any text based webpage, as well as youtube and tiktok videos. These then have all claims extracted, cross-referenced, and have a summary and bullsh!t score generated for them. I also built a semantic/similarity based search functionality that allows users to search for any claim or topic to see what fact checks have already been submitted by others.

The second part is the chrome extension. The chrome extension allows users to fact check the current url they are on directly, or highlight specific text and get that checked individually. The claims are then linked to the url and highlighted to all users with the chrome extension downloaded. The idea is that as you are browsing, you can check dodgy looking information. With all users doing this the hope is that very quickly breaking news and critical information is quickly checked so that users can quickly determine truth from bullsh!t.

How we built it

The key external systems used are OpenAI and Exa.ai. OpenAI is used to extract claims, transcribe audio to text, and analyse the claims against the sources returned by Exa.ai. I used 21st dev quite regularly to help with the UI. Authentication is handled via Supabase, and essentially all the AI based api processes are handled in Supabase edge functions to prevent Netlify from timing out the requests. I used chatgpt a fair bit to help convert API functions into edge functions as I made the mistake of deploying my app to Netlify quite late, which I shall discuss in the challenges section. I built the chrome extension myself largely in vs code as it was a lot easier to keep rebuilding it and refreshing it, whereas in the bolt environment id need to keep downloading it locally.

Challenges we ran into

I did not assess how netlify's edge functions worked, and did not realise they had such a low timeout time. This meant I needed to convert all my long running api calls (mostly AI based) into supabase edge functions in order to ensure they would run without failure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The live fact checking chrome extension and the youtube/tiktok video processing are definitely my proudest accomplishments. It took a very long time to get them working, but they are such an integral part of the app I have built. I am also just generally incredibly proud of myself for completing this app to the level that I have. Have worked like crazy to do it so am very glad (was honestly stressing I would not get it completed, almost bit off more than I could chew)

What we learned

Deploy asap to ensure things are always working in production environment before moving on. How to better communicate with LLM's to get the responses and workflow I am after.

What's next for Cut The Bullsh!t

Many things, my immediate next step is to develop an API based fact checking badge that can be directly integrated into other websites/blogs either manually or through wordpress. This will act as both a sign of trust to visitors, showing the bullsh!t score of the blog, but also act as an affiliate link for those who choose to integrate it into their site. I want the truth to be rewarding, it is also a good step towards pushing my way into being a part of the SEO algorithm. I would also love to run topical competitions with cash prizes; for example I think it would be fun and useful to run competitions for who can find the most bullsh!t during election periods, etc.

Built With

  • 21st-dev
  • exa.js
  • nextjs
  • openai
  • shadcn
  • supabase
  • tailwind
  • typescript
Share this project:

Updates