Pinocchio | Devpost

Our website
The dashboard where reports are archived.
Testing on CNN, a somewhat reputable source of information.
Pinocchio successfully identifies that this is trustworthy.
The Onion usually has fake news.
Pinocchio is successful in identifying misinformation.
A list of latest reports generated by Pinocchio extensions on the dashboard.
An example report.

Inspiration

Inspired by the classic tale of Pinocchio, whose nose grows when he tells lies. When using the chrome extension, Pinocchio's nose grows or shrinks according to the misinformation score.

What it does

When you go on any website, or even youtube video, and open up the Pinocchio extension, it will start analyzing, comparing with sources on the internet, and give back a reliability score, a summary of the verdict, a detailed report comparing against information online, and additional context in case the page hasn't given enough. Every time a report is generated, it is automatically sent to a centralized database visible from our website, that records all reports and analyses the data. It is useful because in a glance you can see the most, and least trustworthy websites out there and quickly visualize trends and patterns.

How we built it

All the front end, including the website, dashboard, and extension, is in vanilla HTML, CSS and JS. The backend is a flask python server, which manages requests to Gemini API, handles the database (SQLite), and keeps everything connected and running smoothly. This project relies 100% on the Gemini API for analyses. The backend is hosted on Linode cloud infrastructure.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the time constraints and everyone having slightly different ideas, it was difficult to synchronize and we ended up with everyone building their own thought process and merging at the end. Additionally, there was another group that I hope by pure coincidence also decided to make a fact checker chrome extension, though their idea was more geared towards preventing scams. This, however, was encouragement for us, and just meant we had to make a better product than theirs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The best accomplishment that we are proud of is that moment, when we migrated to cloud, changed the name of one package to fix some errors, and saw that it was working, and accessible through the browser, It is the hallelujah moment you get when something you make actually works.

What we learned

Always use AI to fix errors. No matter how smart you are, you can still break things with one wrong command.

What's next for Pinocchio

First, there are some bug fixes needed, so that's a priority. Next we will most likely release this on the Chrome Web Store to get some real users, however we will have to make UI improvements and set up our server for production.