In an exciting innovation, The Washington Post, our nation’s leading repository of sad articles about John Wall, has decided they’re going to introduce something exciting and entirely new to their news coverage: facts.
Today, The Washington Post introduces a new prototype, The Truth Teller, that does live, automated fact checking of a political speech.
Building off the technology that gave us Zooey Deschanel asking what the weather was like AS SHE LOOKED OUT A WINDOW, The Truth Teller is off to a good start! Here’s one correction in its evaluation of Rep. Gerald Connolly’s (D-VA) speech:
Now, sure, in the guy’s speech, it seems like he clearly says “The Recovery Act, which I proudly supported, cut taxes for ninety five percent of all Americans.” And sure, if that’s what he said, then that claim is the exact thing the Truth Teller is saying. But I’m just a human with a soft heart who hears what he wants to hear. For example, I want to hear sentences with coherent prepositional phrases and adverbs that relate to the rest of the words around them. But The Truth Teller cuts through the spin and gets right to the nougat-filled fact center so quickly that you don’t even realize how little sense this metaphor makes.
