Amador Valley High seniors develop AI tool that fact-checked presidential debate

Students at a Pleasanton high school recently created a tool using artificial intelligence aimed at improving the discourse around elections and helping voters be better informed.
The group of talented Amador Valley High School seniors sat inside their campus library on Thursday morning, but it wasn’t to study or read. They were sharing their findings on their most recent project: a fact-checking AI tool implemented in real-time during the presidential debate.
“Developing the prompt, figuring out how to get the context and the information to the AI,” Amador Valley High senior Vardaan Singhania told CBS News Bay Area.
The students incorporated artificial intelligence and created the online tool for a project that took about three and a half weeks. They wanted to implement the tool just in time for the presidential debate.
“Especially with like the growing political polarization in the world, where a lot of people aren’t willing to like listen to other people and, like, sort of understand other people’s opinions. Having a fact-checker that sort of validates whether or not what people are saying is true in real time is really important,” senior Eric Chen.
Their advanced computer science class is an optional elective. But rather these students had a passion and wanted to learn more on how to apply emerging technology in the real world.
“They were looking for something to challenge them, they were bored and we created a class that really gave them the ability to have open ended problem solving,” said Amador Valley High computer science teacher Kevin Kiyoi.
The class of more than 30 students had to go back and fact check the AI findings from the debate themselves. Kiyoi said they found a fair accuracy score of about 86%.
“AI is a tool. It’s not, ‘Hey, how can I cheat on my homework? How can I get out of an essay?’ But how can I use this to enhance my learning?” Kiyoi said.
This year is only the second year the class has been in session, and the high school is already making waves with some of their projects.
“Probably the most exciting one was called smart trash, which could decide if something was recyclable, compost or trash,” the teacher said.
These high school seniors have dreams beyond the classroom walls.
“I hope to sort of just interact with these sorts of things in the future and I hope to learn more about it,” Chen said.
“I want to make AI more accessible for the average person. Like Chat GPT was a huge step in that direction but I want to make more advanced AI’s that are accessible for people while also implementing proper safeguards to prevent misuse of AI,” Singhania said.