The internet cheapened news but AI could reverse that trend

livemint.com:

Elon Musk has decimated X’s trust and security teams, while Meta Platforms has admitted it is leaning away from caring about news content and Google-parent Alphabet is firing employees involved in news curation. This is happening before we’re fully experiencing the effects of AI, a new frontier in digital fakery. While the use of deepfakes in the Israel conflict has been minimal, the sophistication is increasing.

Proposed measures demanding watermarking or clear disclosures on AI generated material seems toothless, as only the good actors will follow such orders. Tools that purport to detect when an image or video has been created using AI are flawed and will likely become less effective as generative capabilities improve. Tech news site 404 Media reported how one AI image detector erroneously declared a real image—the charred remains of a child—as being an AI-constructed fake.

Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, call this the “Age of Unreality"—where, regardless of the facts, the existence of AI alone undermines the trust we have in what we see and hear. A 2018 California Law Review paper warned this was coming: “Put simply, a sceptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence. This scepticism can be invoked just as well against authentic as against adulterated content." Navigating this world of informational uncertainty will become exhausting.

For many of us, it already is. But there is a good place to find trusted news online: actual news websites. The portion of readers going to news websites directly has been steadily growing since the pandemic, according to data from Similarweb.