Who’d have predicted that social media would become a vector for misinformation powerful enough to spur along revolutions, coups, genocides, and all the darkest urges of humanity? Misinformation is carried along its electrical pulses like dandelion fluff on the wind, spreading out far beyond its origin and planting new seeds of doubt, anger, and confusion wherever it lands.
The sheer volume of it is matched only by its speed. How’s a person supposed to keep up, to know what’s fakery designed to manipulate and distort? Vet everything. But that’s a tall order for any one person, and it isn’t enough for when you’re not down for a thorough info search, and you just want to skip past all the junk to see photos of your neighborhood chat.
Whether you pay much attention to it or not, misinfo can seep into your consciousness even from a cursory glance.
WhatsApp has integrated an AI tool into the app that functions as a labor-saving (if inevitably imperfect and immature) tool to help quickly sort the fakery from the truth from the most dangerous misinfo out there: the half-truths.
You’ve just gotta dial +1 (833) 436-3285 in the WhatsApp app to get started.
perplexity what?
You know generative AI by its most prominent example, the one that blew the doors open on the whole enterprise for the vast majority of the population who wasn’t keyed into the techiest of developments. That AI is, of course, ChatGPT.
There are others that work, more or less, the same way. Perplexity AI is one of ChatGPT’s competitors, and that’s the AI that Meta (WhatsApp’s owner) has chosen to integrate into WhatsApp itself for the fact-checking feature. Anyone can use it, and it doesn’t cost money.
That said, it’s an admirable use of the AI, but given generative AI’s tendency to make up information of its own, you should take Perplexity AI’s answers with a grain of salt.
Confused? Demoralized? Well, we do what we can at the time with what we’ve got. That’s the way to carry forward in life, as in WhatsApp. The tool may not turn out to be perfect, or even that useful—we’ll have to see—but it’s preferable to the option of letting misinformation run rampant.
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