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A research project's value lies not only in its technical results, but in the ecosystem it generates and the transformations it drives. TrueStories is also a story of collaboration, regional innovation and informational responsibility.

University and industry: a necessary alliance

The collaboration between the University of Salamanca and EUROSTAR MEDIAGROUP that underpins TrueStories follows a clear logic: the technological challenges of the digital age cannot be solved by academia or industry working in isolation. The university contributes deep expertise in artificial intelligence, language processing and knowledge representation; the company contributes applied context, real-world data and the perspective of those who produce and distribute content at scale.

This kind of collaboration is precisely what the TCUE Plan 2021-2023 of Castile and Leon sought to catalyse. The Plan, recently evaluated by the Regional Ministry of Education, identifies public-private collaboration projects as one of the most effective instruments for transforming scientific knowledge into economic and social value. TrueStories appears in that report as one of the funded projects in the area of Technologies and Cybersecurity, one of the plan's strategic pillars.

The context: disinformation as a systemic challenge

TrueStories emerges at a moment when disinformation has moved from being a marginal problem to a central concern for institutions, governments and citizens alike. Existing verification mechanisms — human fact-checkers, platform moderation policies — are confronted with a volume of content that makes manual review materially impossible.

The audiovisual and literary dimension of disinformation has received less attention than the news domain, but its potential impact is equal or greater. Works of fiction reach mass audiences, generate intense emotions and build frames of reference that persist for years. An inaccurate portrayal of a disease in a popular series can influence the attitudes of millions of people towards medical treatments. A historical novel that distorts a conflict can shape entire communities' understanding of their own past.

Results and project horizon

With a start date of October 2022 and an expected completion date of September 2025, TrueStories is in its phase of developing and integrating the technological components. The research team, led by Professor Javier Prieto Tejedor of the University of Salamanca, is working on the construction and validation of the information extraction systems, the development of the certified ontologies, and the training and evaluation of the disinformation classification models.

Expected outputs include scientific publications in high-impact journals in the fields of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the transfer of technological developments to the industrial partner EUROSTAR MEDIAGROUP, and the generation of intellectual property in the form of patents and registered software.

Impact beyond the project

The impact of TrueStories extends beyond its direct outputs. At the scientific level, the project contributes to an emerging line of research — the detection of disinformation in narrative texts — that currently has limited specialist literature. At the industrial level, the methodologies developed can be transferred to other contexts: analysis of educational content, review of science communication materials, or even auditing of generative AI systems that produce fictional content.

At the social level, the project contributes to a healthier information ecosystem — not through content censorship, but through transparency: identifying and flagging where incorrect information appears allows producers, distributors and consumers to make more informed decisions.

Castile and Leon's role in AI research

The region of Castile and Leon has committed to becoming a reference hub for technological research, and the data from the TCUE Plan 2021-2023 show significant progress in that direction. The region's universities — including the University of Salamanca, with its long track record in artificial intelligence — have increased their transfer activity, the number of collaborations with businesses, and their success in competitive national and European funding calls.

TrueStories is, in that context, an example of the kind of research the region seeks to promote: interdisciplinary, with identifiable social impact, with real business participation and with international reach. European funding through NextGenerationEU also underlines the continental dimension of the challenge the project addresses.

A final reflection: the responsibility of stories

Stories shape us. From childhood, we learn about the world — its history, its science, its social norms — through narrative. Fiction holds that power precisely because we lower our defences: we suspend our disbelief to live the narrative experience. That same power is what makes it so important to ensure that the stories we tell do not construct, whether deliberately or inadvertently, a distorted image of reality.

TrueStories does not seek to judge works of fiction or homogenise the way stories are told. It seeks, simply, to give us the tools to know when a story strays from the truth — and by how much, and why. In a world where the boundary between fiction and information is increasingly blurred, that capability is a resource of incalculable value.

Funded by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR

Project reference: CPP2021-008358