Despite the availability of sophisticated tools and professional fact-checking services, the average citizen remains weaponless against disinformation campaigns. TITAN leverages AI to create a conversational coach that helps users think through a piece of information, question its validity and come to their own decisions around accuracy and truthfulness. This presentation by Antonis Ramfos from ATC, given at EU Regions Week 2023, outlines TITAN's technological approach to support human capabilities. Subscribe for news/updates at www.titanthinking.eu

1. How Generative AI can combat
disinformation?
Antonis Ramfos

2. Disinformation and the Citizen
Despite the availability of sophisticated tools and professional fact-checking services, the average
citizen remains weaponless against disinformation campaigns
• Lack of expertise in fact-checking and use of relevant tools
• Weak against disinformation campaigns’ sophisticated trickery (weak critical thinking)
o COVID-19
o Limited success of crowdsourcing efforts
o Uncritical sharing of claims in social media
 A citizen requires empowerment to successfully deal with disinformation in:
o understanding whether factual statements are true,
o interpreting and critically assessing the arguments and reasoning of a statement
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3. Our solution empowers
people to examine the
facts they read online
through a logic driven
investigation using a
personalised AI-coach
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4. TITAN: An AI-based Citizen Coaching Ecosystem against Disinformation
• Disinformation campaigns aim at inactivating citizen’s critical thinking capacity.
• TITAN implements an intelligent ‘chatbot’ capable of guiding the citizen to logical conclusions
about the factual correctness or reliability of a statement. Citizen will be assisted in:
• interpreting and critically assessing the reasoning and arguments involved in a statement
on their own
• conducting their own investigations either on an individual basis, or in collaboration with
other citizens on whether factual statements are true or reliable
• enhancing their critical thinking skills for better detection of disinformation they may
encounter in the future at scale
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5. Generative-AI approach to generate Socratic dialogues
TITAN will use a Generative-AI approach to generate Socratic
inquiring dialogues about a statement that:
• take into consideration the citizen’s critical thinking
capacity assessment
• incorporate use of fact-checking/verification processes
and tools based on the analysis of the statement at hand
and citizen’s skills
• provide personalised experiential learning approach to
media literacy micro-lessons according to the citizen’s
critical thinking capacity
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6. Structured dialogues coach users through 6 key critical
thinking processes when exploring claims in the news
Clarification​: What do you mean when you say X?
Challenging assumptions​: What assumptions are we making here?​
Evidence and reasoning​: Can you provide an example that supports what you are saying?​
Alternative viewpoints​: Are there alternative viewpoints?​
Implications and consequences​: How would this affect someone?​
Challenging the question​: What do you think was important about that question?
Socratic Inquiring Method

7. Fine-tuning the LLM: Data Acquisition & Modeling
• Define specific user inquiries – statements to be
verified
• Develop inquiring dialogues by-hand (Socratic
dialogues incorporating C-T assessment, fact-checking
tools, micro-lessons)
• Use co-creation to complete and expand above
dialogues
• Implement a rule-based system that implements the
above inquiring dialogues
• Use co-creation to collect validated learning about
the inquiring dialogues with the least effort
• Produce reliable data for fine-tuning the LLM
• Perform fine-tuning on selected LLM model.
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 Instead of trying to model and engineer a full-fledged LLM-based solution upfront, first focus on learning
as much as possible about the problem-solution space

8. Thank you Antonis Ramfos
a.ramfos@atc.gr
www.atc.gr
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