Na Huang, The Daily Nexus, University of California, Santa Barbara; Making sure it’s Correkt: a group of UCSB students set out to revolutionize the ethics of AI chatbots
"When second-year computer science major Alexzendor Misra first came to UC Santa Barbara in Fall Quarter 2022, he had no idea an ill-fated encounter with a conspiracy-believing peer would inspire the creation of an artificial intelligence search engine, Correkt.
Merely two months into college, Misra began a project that he hopes can truly change the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
Now, Misra and his team, consisting of first-year statistics and data science major Andre Braga, first-year computer science major Ryan Hung, first-year statistics and data science major Chan Park, first-year computer engineering major Khilan Surapaneni and second-year computer science majors Noah Wang and Ramon Wang, are ready to showcase the outcome of their project. They are preparing themselves to present their product, Correkt, an AI search engine, to the UCSB community at the AI Community of Practice (CoP) Spring Symposium on May 20.
Correkt is not so different from ChatGPT — in fact, what ChatGPT does, Correkt can do too. Yet, Correkt aims to solve one critical issue with ChatGPT: misinformation.
It is known that ChatGPT is prone to “hallucinations,” and according to IBM, it refers to the generation of false information due to the AI software’s misinterpretation of patterns or objects. Correkt is designed to prevent these instances of misinformation dissemination in two ways.
Correkt is linked solely to reputable data sources — newspapers, textbooks and peer-reviewed journals. The AI model currently draws its information from an expansive data bank of over 180 million well-established, trustworthy resources — a number set to grow with time. This greatly lowers the risk of receiving inaccurate information by eliminating unreliable sources. However, it still does not give users the freedom to verify the information they access.
This is where Correkt truly sets itself apart from pre-existing AI chatbots: it includes a built-in citation function that details the precise location where every piece of information it presents to the user was retrieved. Essentially, Correkt is a hybrid between a search engine and an AI chatbot. The citation function allows users to judge for themselves the accuracy and validity of the information they receive as they would when conducting research through a search engine. The difference would be that the results will be much more streamlined with the support of AI.
“[Correkt] has so much more value as a way to find information, like a new generation of [a] search engine,” Misra comments enthusiastically."
