Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore

livemint.com:

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone. Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events.

The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true. We’ve long been warned about the potential of social media to distort our view of the world, and now there is the potential for more false and misleading information to spread on social media than ever before. Just as importantly, exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see.

Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. “When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’" says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation. This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend," says Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory.