Washington Post, Virginia Tech collaborate on AI news search tool

Virginia Tech Ph.D. students (from left) Shailik Sarkar and Sha Li are working with Naren Ramakrishnan, director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, on a project with The Washington Post. Photo by Craig Newcomb for Virginia Tech.

A recent trailer for the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film “Megalopolis” made headlines, but not for the reasons it was supposed to.

Meant to bolster the director’s image as an iconoclast, the trailer quoted negative critic reviews of some of Coppola’s masterpieces, such as “Apocalypse Now” and “The Godfather,” from the time the films were released. There was just one problem — the quotes weren’t real. The marketing consultant responsible for sourcing them had, evidently, generated them using artificial intelligence (AI).

This is hardly the first high-profile case of this particular form of AI — a large language model (LLM) — inventing and misattributing information. We’ve seen lawyers file briefs citing cases that don’t exist. These fabrications, or hallucinations, can be quite authoritatively written in a way that may sound plausible enough for people to accept without thinking twice. So when it comes to the future of AI-driven search tools, accuracy is paramount. That’s why, when The Washington Post decided to create such a tool to help users better access its own archive, it enlisted Naren Ramakrishnan, director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, based at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus in Alexandria.

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