Watch out for an explosion of A.I.-generated fake news sites in 2024 | Opinion
There will be many threats to democracy and world peace in 2024 — a crucial election year in the United States, Mexico and dozens of other countries — but one of the biggest ones will be the likelihood that artificial intelligence will trigger an unprecedented flood of fake news.
It’s already happening. ChatGPT, Bard and many other generative artificial intelligence platforms, as well as unscrupulous media titans such as X — formerly Twitter — owner Elon Musk, are making it increasingly easy for almost anybody to disseminate fake news.
According to NewsGuard, a company that tracks fake news sites, artificial intelligence will become a fake news “super-spreader.”
NewsGuard found 603 A.I.-enabled news sites that operated with little or no human supervision in December, up from 49 such sites in May last year. Most of these news sites have names such as iBusiness Day, Daily Time Update or others that resemble those of established news organizations, it said.
“A lot of these low-quality fake news sites used to rely on paid contributors,” NewsGuard’s artificial intelligence tracking manager McKenzie Sadeghi told me. “But now, with ChatGPT and other A.I. tools, they can have these chatbots write content for them at a quicker and cheaper rate than ever before.”
While some of these A.I.-generated news sites are created by Russia, China and Iran, or by politicians who want to smear their opponents, others are money machines: the more scandalous fake news they publish, the more clicks they get, and the more money they make from advertisers or social media.
And with the proliferation of fake audio and video, it will become increasingly hard for most people to distinguish reality from fantasy.
To make things worse, X-owner Musk has eliminated many of the platform’s former content verification employees, in part to cut costs.
NewsGuard found that 74% of X’s most viral fake news about the Israel-Hamas war in October was published by “verified” blue-checks accounts, which can now be obtained by anybody willing to pay 8 dollars a month. In the past, Twitter only gave blue check verification marks to reliable news sources.
In one of the latest examples of how fake news is influencing public opinion, a new Washington Post poll released Jan. 3 found that 25% of Americans believe that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. That falsehood has been spread despite the fact that there is zero evidence to back it up.
NewsGuard’s Sadeghi told me that one way to detect artificial intelligence-generated fake news is to verify whether articles have an author’s byline, and whether that person exists. You can do that by checking that name in Google, or in social media, she added.
Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism specializing in ethics at the University of California at Berkeley, and former Miami Herald business editor, recommends that readers also do their own background check on news sites they don’t know.
“You should ask, is anybody else reporting what you just read?” Wasserman told me. “That means turning to news sources that you believe to be credible, organizations that are staffed by professional journalists. Are they also reporting this story?”
Granted, populist demagogues across the political spectrum — from Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to America’s Donald Trump — have done an excellent job trying to discredit mainstream media in order to get away with their lies.
But the fact is that most mainstream media, from the right and the left, check the facts before they publish them. Just like your local supermarket won’t sell you rotten food because they would lose clients, traditional media staffed by professional journalists won’t knowingly give you fake news because they would lose their audiences.
As we enter 2024, one of my biggest wishes is that more people learn to rely on news sources that — like supermarkets — check the quality of their content. Otherwise, with the expected avalanche of artificial intelligence-generated fake news, the world will become a much more dangerous place.
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