There will be many threats to democracy and world peace in 2024, a key election year in the United States, Mexico and several other countries, but one of the main ones will be the proliferation of fake news generated by new news platforms. artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s already happening. ChatGPT, Bard and many other platforms artificial intelligence generative, as well as unscrupulous social media owners like Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), are making it increasingly easier for anyone to spread fake news.
According to NewsGuard, a company that tracks fake news sites, the artificial intelligence It is becoming a “super spreader” of fake news.
NewsGuard found 603 news sites generated by artificial intelligence operating with little or no human supervision in December, compared to 49 such sites in May last year. Most of these news sites have names like iBusiness Day, Daily Time Update or others that are very similar to well-known media outlets, he said.
“A lot of these low-quality fake news sites used to have paid contributors,” the news manager told me. artificial intelligence by NewsGuard, McKenzie Sadeghi. “But now, with ChatGPT and other platforms artificial intelligence, “Contents of this type can be created more quickly and economically than ever.”
While some of these automated fake news sites are created by Russia, China and Iran, or by politicians who want to smear their rivals, others are created to make money. The more scandalous fake news they publish, the more clicks they get and the more money they earn from their advertisers or social networks.
And with the proliferation of fake audio and video, it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy. To make matters worse, Musk fired many X employees who were dedicated to content verification, which has contributed to a rise in fake news on that platform.
NewsGuard found that 74% of X news stories about the war between Israel and Hamas in October were published by “verified” accounts, which can now be obtained by anyone willing to pay. In one of the latest examples of how fake news is influencing public opinion, a new Washington Post poll found that 25% of Americans believe the FBI instigated the January 6 assault on the Capitol. 2021.
This falsehood has been spread even though there is no evidence to support it. NewsGuard’s Sadeghi told me that one way to detect fake news generated by artificial intelligence is to verify if the articles carry the signature of an author, and if that person exists. One can find out by searching for those names on Google or social media, he added.
Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor specializing in ethics at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that readers also need to do their research on little-known news sites.
“You should always ask yourself: Is some other outlet reporting what you just read?” Wasserman told me. If no media with professional journalists spreads that news, it is probably false, he added. It is true that populist demagogues of all political stripes, from Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to Donald Trump in the United States, have done an excellent job trying to discredit the mainstream media in order to justify their lies. But the fact is that most major professional media outlets, left and right, fact-check before publishing them. Just as your supermarket does not sell rotten food because it would lose customers, traditional media run by professional journalists do not knowingly spread fake news because they would lose their audience. Going into 2024, one of my greatest hopes is that more people get news from sites that verify information before publishing it, just like supermarkets that examine their food before offering it to the public. Otherwise, with the wave of fake news generated by artificial intelligence, The world will become a much more dangerous place.
© El Nuevo Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
