Fake news is real.
I’m not talking about how the term is casually thrown around about any story that a news consumer happens to disagree with or believes is slanted. Former President Donald Trump has codified that as a convenient way to try to discredit the media.
No, this is about actual fake news.
The Washington Post reported recently on how artificial intelligence is generating false stories that look and sound real. As the Post’s Pranshu Verma reported, “Since (last) May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.”
Fake news is not new, but historically it has been created by individuals or intelligence organizations. But AI makes it easier and faster to generate a real-looking fake story.
One of the more infamous ones generated by AI was a “story” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist had committed suicide and that he left a note behind suggesting that Netanyahu was involved. The Post reports the story “was recirculated on media sites in Arabic, English and (in) Indonesia and spread by users on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram.”
Jack Brewster, a researcher at NewsGuard, told the Post, “Some of these sites are generating hundreds if not thousands of articles a day.”
NewsGuard reports the false information is not just news copy; it is “seeing a higher percentage of misinformation made from manipulated media like doctored images and audio clips.”
This significant expansion of fake news will make it even more difficult for consumers to discern what is true and what is not. That is further complicated by the inclination of consumers to seek information that reinforces what they already believe.
If you think that Netanyahu is a bad guy, then it is not much of a stretch to believe he had something to do with his “psychiatrist’s suicide.” Now, imagine what is going to happen during the U.S. presidential election with our increasingly polarized politics!
Jeffrey Blevins, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati, told the Post, “The danger is the scope and scale with AI… especially when paired with more sophisticated algorithms. It’s an information war on a scale we haven’t seen before.”
As long as there has been news, there has been fake news, with miscreants spreading false or damaging stories under the guise of legitimate news. Historically, it has been relatively easy to differentiate between what is real and what is a sham.
But with AI we are going to have fake news on steroids, swamping social media sites with real-looking information that has the potential to sway opinions and affect policy. It is the real fake news that necessitates consumers keep their guard up.