disinformation Archives

President Zelenskyy deepfake asks Ukrainians to ‘lay down arms’

A deepfake of President Zelenskyy calling on citizens to “lay down arms” was posted to a hacked Ukrainian news website and shared across social networks.

The deepfake purports to show Zelenskyy declaring that Ukraine has “decided to return Donbas” to Russia and that his nation’s efforts had failed.

Following an alleged hack, the deepfake was first posted to a Ukrainian news site for TV24. The deepfake was then shared across social networks, including Facebook...

17 March 2022 | Deep & Reinforcement Learning

Deepfakes are being used to push anti-Ukraine disinformation

Influence operations with ties to Russia and Belarus have been found using deepfakes to push anti-Ukraine disinformation.

Last week, AI News reported on the release of a study that found humans can generally no longer distinguish between real and AI-generated “deepfake” faces.

As humans, we’re somewhat trained to believe what we see with our eyes. Many believed that it was only a matter of time before Russia took advantage of deepfakes and our human psychology to...

1 March 2022 | Deep & Reinforcement Learning

James Cameron warns of the dangers of deepfakes

Legendary director James Cameron has warned of the dangers that deepfakes pose to society.

Deepfakes leverage machine learning and AI techniques to convincingly manipulate or generate visual and audio content. Their high potential to deceive makes them a powerful tool for spreading disinformation, committing fraud, trolling, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaq4sWFvnAY

“Every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to...

24 January 2022 | Ethics & Society

Social media algorithms are still failing to counter misleading content

As the Afghanistan crisis continues to unfold, it’s clear that social media algorithms are unable to counter enough misleading and/or fake content.

While it’s unreasonable to expect that no disingenuous content will slip through the net, the sheer amount that continues to plague social networks shows that platform-holders still have little grip on the issue.

When content is removed, it should either be prevented from being reuploaded or at least flagged as...

17 August 2021 | Ethics & Society

Two grads recreate OpenAI’s text generator it deemed too dangerous to release

openai text generator ai artificial intelligence fake news disinformation researchers grad

Two graduates have recreated and released a fake text generator similar to OpenAI's which the Elon Musk-founded startup deemed too dangerous to make public.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know the world already has a fake news problem. In the past, at least fake news had to be written by a real person to make it convincing.

OpenAI created an AI which could automatically generate fake stories. Combine fake news, with Cambridge Analytica-like targeting, and...