Blog | Laurent Bolli

Digital Dual-Perspective AI: A Swiss Open-Source Shield Against Misinformation

Laurent Bolli
Jul 10
4 min read

In an era where false stories race through social feeds six times faster than the truth. 1 2, Switzerland’s forthcoming open-source large language model (LLM) from EPFL and ETH Zürich offers a timely foundation for a new class of conversational tools designed to educate society against deceptive content.

Solution Outline

The Dual-Perspective Veracity Assistant (DP-VA) is a conversational application that delivers two rigorously sourced viewpoints—one affirmative, one circumspect—whenever a user asks about a claim, document, or hyperlink. By embedding balanced evidence directly into the reply, DP-VA promotes critical thinking, minimises echo-chamber reinforcement, and equips organisations to monitor their reputations in real time.

Technical Backbone

Swiss Open-Source LLM: Trained on 15 trillion tokens and fluent in more than 1,000 languages, the 70-billion-parameter model released under Apache 2.0 licensing ensures transparency, modifiability, and auditability 3 4.
Alps Supercomputer Infrastructure: With 42 exaFLOPS of FP8 AI performance, CSCS’s Alps cluster accelerates model updates and secure fine-tuning for domain-specific deployments 5 6.
Evidence Retrieval Engine: Hybrid dense-sparse retrieval pipelines scan high-credibility databases, scientific journals, public-sector APIs, and fact-checking repositories. Each cited sentence in a response carries inline, clickable provenance metadata.
Dual-Generator Module: Two decoders—Advocate and Sceptic—are prompted with opposing rhetorical frames. The Advocate emphasises corroborating literature; the Sceptic surfaces uncertainties, methodological flaws, or conflicting studies. Temperature and top-p settings differ slightly to diversify lexical style while preserving factual core.

Key Features

Feature	Advocate Mode	Skeptic Mode	Shared Guarantees
Tone	Constructive optimism 7	Critical caution 7	Civility & neutrality
Source Threshold	≥90% confidence score	≥70% confidence score	Full inline citations
Output Length	250–350 tokens	250–350 tokens	≤1 second latency (cached)
Bias Check	Sentiment skew flagging 8	Fallacy detection9	Model self-audit logs

Deployment Formats

Web Dashboard: Drag-and-drop documents, URLs, or plain text. Instant dual analysis appears side by side with colour-coded credibility bars.
Browser Extension: Hover-to-verify overlay injects dual capsules atop highlighted statements across news sites, blogs, and social media.
API Suite: JSON endpoints enable enterprises to integrate veracity scoring into chatbots, CRMs, and threat intelligence pipelines.

Organisational Use Cases

Corporate Reputation Management: Continuous monitoring of brand mentions; board-ready risk briefs pair favourable narratives with potential liabilities.
NGO Transparency Audits: Automated checks of claims in campaign materials; grants officers receive balanced dossiers before funding decisions.
Journalistic Fact-Decks: Newsrooms drop quotes into the interface to receive dual context before publication, cutting verification turnaround from hours to seconds.
Classroom Media-Literacy Labs: Students compare Advocate and Sceptic outputs to practice source triangulation, directly addressing the finding that 93% of college students misjudge online content bias. 10.

Governance & Privacy

All processing may occur within Swiss borders, subject to strict data protection rules. Metadata is anonymised and deleted after 24 hours unless enterprise clients activate encrypted logging for compliance audits. Regular red-team evaluations seek to identify hallucinations, bias drift, or adversarial prompts.

Monetisation

Freemium public use; tiered enterprise licensing for volume query quotas and on-premise deployments. Swiss start-ups tapping the model receive subsidised computing vouchers through CSCS spin-off provisions 11.

Made with MidJourney v7.0 and Photoshop with the prompt: "dual-pane AI chat interface, split-screen design, Swiss design aesthetic, citation numbers throughout, browser extension overlay, clean minimalist UI, red Swiss cross logo, multilingual text samples, --ar 16:9 --stylise 500

Rationale

Societal Need: False narratives spread more quickly because they seem novel and emotionally charged. 12 13. Young digital natives—often presumed savvy—struggle to discern paid content, misattribute lobbying sites as neutral, and rarely cross-check sources. 10. Traditional fact-check outlets cannot scale to viral velocity. Tools that render a single, definitive verdict (“true” or “false”) risk oversimplification and trigger reactance in sceptical audiences.

Dual-Perspective Advantage: Studies show that people perceive statements that contradict their views as less biased and more helpful when they come from AI rather than humans, even if the statements are identical. 7. By intentionally pairing supportive and critical frames, DP-VA exploits this receptiveness to encourage nuanced reasoning. The cognitive psychology of inoculation theory (Compton et al., 2021) suggests exposure to weakened counter-arguments fortifies resistance to later misinformation; DP-VA operationalises this by embedding a built-in “refutation pre-exposure” step.

Trust Through Transparency: An open-source Swiss LLM discloses code, weights, and training corpora, contrasting opaque commercial models. This aligns with the EU AI Act’s transparency mandates and encourages independent audits, indispensable for credibility in fact-checking contexts.

Scalability & Sovereignty: Locating the system in the Alps provides sovereign, green energy–powered computing and avoids extraterritorial data jurisdictions. 5 11. The architecture supports vCluster segregation, allowing corporate organisations to host proprietary document indices without commingling data.

Behavioural Impact: Balanced framing helps reduce confirmation bias and encourages healthy public discussions. By being part of users' browsing experiences, DP-VA makes it easier for people to evaluate information effectively. Organisations receive early alerts about spreading rumours, enabling them to respond quickly and with solid evidence, rather than just reacting with PR measures.

DP-VA merges Swiss AI transparency with proven debiasing techniques to deliver an antidote proportionate to the speed and scale of 21st-century misinformation.

List of references:

Compton, J. et al. (2021) 'Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories,' Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 15(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12602.

Lu, L., Tormala, Z.L. and Duhachek, A. (2025) 'How AI sources can increase openness to opposing views,' Scientific Reports, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-00791-z.

Diamond, N. (2024) AI does not alter perceptions of text messages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01726.

Lim, S. and Schmälzle, R. (2024) 'The effect of source disclosure on evaluation of AI-generated messages,' Computers in Human Behavior Artificial Humans, 2(1), p. 100058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbah.2024.100058.

Chae, J.H. and Tewksbury, D. (2024) 'Perceiving AI intervention does not compromise the persuasive effect of fact-checking,' New Media & Society [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241286881.

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