Fact Check Explorer and Other Tools

Google announced in October 2023 a new Image Detection tool building upon existing features of their Fact Check Explorer released earlier that Summer. This asset now allows you to research headlines or images you find online and evaluate them if they are true or false (Khan, 2023).

As the tool is still in Beta, its capabilities to detect Fake News is limited. When searching for a news story, you have to be very specific with your wording to find any results related to your topic. Similarly the tool struggles to detect photos when using its image search.

Another new feature is their 'About this Image' tool for discovering Images through Google. You can use this asset to find the rough date of the image's origin and where it has been used. This might be useful for detecting photos which were reused in another news story in a misleading context.

AI-generated content can pose a threat to news credibility with its ability to generate and publish fake articles and create manufactured images. Recently Google was urged by the EU to start labelling content which is artificially generated. (O'Carroll, 2023).

Last year Google released a new software SynthID used to detect and watermark content made by AI. Currently the software is only available for a limited number of customers, but might see a full rollout later (Chakravarti, 2023).