Misinformation and disinformation on the internet are hardly new concerns. But according to NBC News, experts warn that the growing omnipresence of AI tools changed the game.
What's happening?
In 2016, a flood of social media disinformation during that year's general election in the United States led to a widespread crackdown on internet falsehoods.
Senate hearings were held, analyses and studies were published, and the phrase "fake news" entered the lexicon.
At the time, lawmakers and pundits viewed the problem as one of technology outpacing informational safeguards.
But ten years on, experts are concerned that the advent of AI could whittle away what little is left of "consensus reality."
Slick, easy-to-use tools like OpenAI's Sora enable anyone to generate incredibly lifelike videos Third-party tools can remove the watermark identifying it as AI-generated — or add it to real footage, muddying the waters.
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"In terms of just looking at an image or a video, it will essentially become impossible to detect if it's fake. I think that we're getting close to that point, if we're not already there," said Stanford Social Media Lab's founding director Jeff Hancock.
Why is AI-generated disinformation concerning?
As Hancock noted, users have relied on AI "tells" like "the number of fingers." But rapidly advancing technology is making those signals unreliable and obsolete.
While Facebook and Twitter implemented stringent trust and safety measures in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook controversially discontinued those efforts. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter, renamed it "X," and halted counterdisinformation measures.
AI-generated deepfakes have already confounded users and news outlets. During Hurricane Melissa, an AI-generated clip went viral, stripped of context about its origins.
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Every day 💯 Reality isn't the only thing being jeopardized by a quickly advancing AI-driven world.
AI data centers have become a major point of contention. They've strained power grids and caused electric bills to spike dramatically. AI's impact on the energy landscape prompted a rare warning from the Department of Energy about grid capacity.
Suffice to say, the hasty scaling of AI has already impacted daily life. A disinformation crisis is one of several credible concerns.
One consistent finding from post-2016 analyses of human-generated fake news was that its prevalence enabled users to pick and choose news to suit their personal worldviews. This happened regardless of what the truth was.
University of Rhode Island Professor Renee Hobbs warned of the "cognitive exhaustion" caused by a flood of false information. It's also known as the "firehose" model of propaganda.
"If constant doubt and anxiety about what to trust is the norm, then actually, disengagement is a logical response," she began, describing a "coping mechanism" with disastrous consequences to NBC News.
Hobbs continued, " … when people stop caring about whether something's true or not, then the danger is not just deception, but actually it's worse than that. It's the whole collapse of even being motivated to seek truth."
What can be done about it?
Hobbs and other researchers are scrambling to "incorporate generative AI into media literacy education." But users can only do so much amid a tsunami of falsehoods.
Contacting lawmakers to demand action on AI-generated disinformation is one way constituents can help effect change on a larger scale.
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