Inspiration
During this time of year, misinformation is rampant! We've both recently learned a great deal about the building blocks for this application, so we wanted to put our newly acquired skills to the test to create an extension to filter out that misinformation.
What it does
Truthy reads in the data from the webpage and passes the text to a pre-engineered LLM on Cloudflare to read the text and pick out the important facts to return to the user. The user can also provide their own instructions to get more out of Truthy if the initial scan was not enough.
How we built it
We used a combination of Node.js and Chrome extension tools in JavaScript to build the extension and an API to interact with our LLM. For our LLM, we're using ollama and the llama3.1:8b model.
Challenges we ran into
The project ran fairly smoothly, but we ran into an issue of unexpectedly running out of credits on Cloudflare! I ended up having to make an account to swap over to so we could keep working with the LLM.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It works REALLY well! We're able to pass it massive transcripts from the presidential debate for example, and it'll pull out key facts from the debate devoid of bias. It responds when the content is purely satirical or misleading and informs the user when those items are present.
What we learned
We learned that AI takes a lot of processing power! We had initially started out with a smaller model running locally on our machines, but we just weren't able to get the extra oomph we needed to be able to fine-tune our responses. We found the more powerful llama model, but it was too big for either of us to install on our machines, so we ended up using Cloudflare which worked super well! It had the storage for our larger model and was also fast enough to make our queries return in a reasonable amount of time.
What's next for Truthy
- Building regeneration of responses into the app
- Bias reporting on Truthy's information in cases where Truthy may not be completely objective
- Site proofing (Truthy needs better general protections as it's not always as effective on every page)
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