Misinformation was the easy part. Meet AskLaura.ai

A year ago, we set out to do something that sounded simple. Help people verify what they see, hear, and read in an environment where that is getting harder by the day. Today, Get Fact becomes asklaura.ai. The mission has not changed, nor has the why.

We started convinced misinformation was the problem. It is barely the surface. Every decision you and I make now runs through information harder to verify than a year ago. This touches our health. Our money. Our votes. Our kids. Our climate. Our communities. All of it.

Every decision you and I make now runs through information harder to verify than a year ago, and harder still a year from now. It is the co-pilot in your inbox, the assistant summarizing your meetings, the computer-to-computer handoffs happening without you, the agent your kids consult.

Increasingly, the conversations will not be human to AI but AI to AI, computer to computer, with your assistant talking to my assistant, brokering decisions on our behalf, while the source material gets buried under three layers of synthesis. Exciting in many ways, and worrying in the one that matters most. We cannot see who is making which decisions, or on what information.

Here is the part we have to admit. Nobody is coming to fix this. The big AI labs will not step into this space, because it is a legal quagmire and a political nightmare for them, and the incentives point the other way.

Governments cannot solve it either. The moment a government starts declaring what is fact, the room turns on it for overreach, and rightly so. Trust in institutions is at a historic low. Canada, like many democracies, is vulnerable. The result is a gap, a widening one, between the speed at which information is generated and the tools anyone has to check it. That gap is where asklaura.ai lives.

On the name change from Get Fact. “Facts” has become a loaded word. For some it landed like a finger-wag. For others, a fight about whose facts, whose truth. That was never our mission. Think of the nutrition label on the bottle. These are the facts. You can like them, ignore them, decide they don’t matter today. But know they are there, and know we will help you find them.

We do not declare what is true. We point you to where the verifiable information lives, and show the work. You decide. That has always been the model. The new name fits better.

Which brings us to this new phase, and why we are excited. We have spent the year with leaders in and out of Ottawa. With researchers, founders, journalists, and regulators. With parents and teachers. We were asked to submit our views on AI safety to the Senate. We joined meaningful conversations at conferences.

We are closer to what we set out to build from day one, and that is a way for anyone to see, in the moment, where the information they are using actually comes from.

The next phase is pilots, with a small group of partners. We will share what we learn here, as we go. If you are interested in a pilot, or know an organization that would benefit, we want to hear from you.

To everyone who got us here, from the amazing advisors, the subscribers, the friends, the strangers who became friends, the people who picked up the phone…thank you.

Yes, the problem is bigger than we thought. But so, we discovered, is the appetite to fix it. So many of you, and so many others, are joining us. Thank you for being part of it. We are excited to keep going, and to grow this, with you.

Thank you!

Let us know if you see anything worth sharing, Canadians pushing back against attacks, misinformation, or disinformation.

Did we got something wrong? Tell us. It happens. We correct it.

Hello@asklaura.ai