Generative artificial intelligence poses many issues regarding fake information. When some AI platforms do not have a response to a prompt, they "hallucinate" creating a false or nonsensical response. For example, giving a user a pizza recipe with inedible items in the ingredients list. This is an example of AI and misinformation. The pizza example is a funny one, but when it comes to legal or medical advice, the user may not see that the response is a hallucination. There are also fake news sites that generate all of their content from AI platforms and exist only as a space where to generate advertising revenue, with no review process for the information they post.
Malicious users can also use generative AI to purposefully create disinformation or propaganda materials to share. Generative AI can quickly make pretend images and videos that look and/or sound real.
Fact-checking may also become more difficult in the future as companies that run search engines at this time (e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.) may move to just promoting their own AI platforms instead for users to find information, but the quality and origin of this information may be unclear. Companies that only focus on AI platforms may also come to dominate the Internet, changing the format of how we know it entirely. There are presently many unanswered questions regarding this topic that will require thoughtful and informed reflection by Internet users in order to ensure the information they consume and share is real and credible.
Please see the video below from France 24 English, which documents fake news websites with content created by AI only to collect advertising revenue.
You can also check out our LibGuide on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in/and Higher Education.
