A grouping of major European media organizations has launched a chatbot to combat online disinformation.
ChatEurope is a tool that responds to questions with information verified by journalists. The tool was created by a consortium led by Agence France Presse. Fourteen other news organizations, including France Medias Monde and El Pais in Romania, as well as Deutsche Welle and El Pais in France, have also supported the project. It is also backed up by the European Commission.
DRUID AI is a Romanian enterprise artificial intelligence platform that designed the chatbot. It uses a language-model developed by French startup Mistral. It is hosted on infrastructure created by open-source software provider XWiki, based in Paris. Andreea Plesea is the co-founder and CEO at DRUID AI. She said that the tool allows “natural, humanlike conversations” which help people to access credible information in their native language.
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This tool is similar to ChatGPT but only for verified news. You can ask it any question, such as about EU climate rules or geopolitical conditions in Ukraine. The chatbot will respond with a clear and accurate answer backed up by reputable news sources. ChatEurope’s responses are based on thousands of articles written by the 15 members of the consortium, and include full source citations. The responses cover topics such as EU policy, tech regulation and geopolitics. ChatEurope is available
in seven languages, including English, French, German and Italian. It’s also available in Romanian, Spanish, Polish, and Romanian. ChatEurope is designed to counteract the growing trend of people who follow unverified and false news on platforms like X, TikTok and Telegram. According to the latest European Parliament Youth Survey,over 40% of Europeans aged under 30 use social media as a primary news source. Disinformation is widely spreadon these platforms, which can undermine trust in credible journalism and disrupt elections.
According to Christine Buhagiar of AFP, the director of development and diversity, “media urgently needs to adapt due to pervasive misinformation and the advent artificial intelligence.” “ChatEurope is going to be a game changer when it comes to providing information on European affairs.” The creators claim that despite being backed up by the EU, this tool is completely editorially independent and does not use algorithmic bias.
