Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector (and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem)

· May 28, 2024 at 9:23 AM

It’s much easier to produce AI-generated disinformation than it is to fact check it.

Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector (and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem) — Photo by Kai Wenzel / Unsplash

As an endless stream of entirely wrong and sometimes dangerous AI-generated answers from Google are going viral on social media, new research from Google researchers and several fact checking organizations have found that most image-based disinformation is now AI-generated, but the way researchers collected their data suggests that the problem is even worse than they claim.

The paper, first spotted by the Faked Up newsletter, measures the rise of AI-generated image-based disinformation by looking at what fact checkers at Snopes, Politifact, and other sites have claimed were image-based disinformation. Overall, the study looks at a total of 135,838 fact checks which date back to 1995, but the majority of the claims were created after 2016 and the introduction of ClaimReview, a tagging system that allows fact checkers and publishers to flag disinformation for platforms like Google, Facebook, Bing, and others.