Botlitica: A generative AI-based tool to assist journalists in navigating political propaganda campaigns

Abstract

The hype on generative AI has raised concerns about the spread of disinformation but also opened up new opportunities for hybrid journalism. The proliferation of political propaganda campaigns spread across digital media during election periods constitutes a challenge for journalists who struggle to exercise information gatekeeping. AI-based tools can in principle help, but journalists are resistant to using them since they are sceptical about their compliance with news values and their scarce user-friendliness. To cope with such issues, we present Botlitica, a GPT3-based chatbot able to answer users’ questions according to the information shared on different social media by a given political party which is, thus, embodied by the AI agent in the conversation. The back-end and front-design of the chatbot are devised to privilege transparency. We report the results of a preliminary evaluation of Botlitica which show that the tool fastens journalists’ capabilities to navigate propaganda campaigns inducing them to exercise critical thinking.