SourceScout
When a chatbot tells you something, can it also tell you where that came from?
The question
Generative models are fluent and often wrong. Journalists needed a way to ask a model for a claim and get back the sources that support (or contradict) it.
Collect
SourceScout was built as a ChatGPT plugin. For each claim it gathered candidate sources from the open web and newsroom archives, then cached every page it touched so results could be audited later.
Analyze
Candidate sources were scored on how directly they supported the claim, how independent they were from each other, and how recent they were. Provenance chains, who cited whom, were reconstructed where possible.
Impact
SourceScout won the Knight Foundation Grand Prize and the GPTZero Provenance Prize at the Media Party Chicago 2023 hackathon.