Truth decayCan artificial intelligence help end fake news?
Fake news has already fanned the flames of distrust towards media, politics and established institutions around the world. And while new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) might make things even worse, it can also be used to combat misinformation.
Fake news has already fanned the flames of distrust towards media, politics and established institutions around the world. And while new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) might make things even worse, it can also be used to combat misinformation.
Want to make yourself sound like Obama? In the past, that might have required physically imitating his voice, party-trick style. And even if you were very good at it, it almost certainly wouldn’t present a danger to our democracy. But technology has changed that. You can now easily and accurately make anyone say anything through AI. Just use the service of an online program to record a sentence and listen to what you said in a famous person’s voice.
Programs like this are often called deep fakes - AI systems that adapt audio, pictures and videos to make people say and do things they never did.
These technologies could launch a new era of fake news and online misinformation. In 2017, Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College, who detects fake videos said the rapid proliferation of new manipulation techniques has led to an “arms race.” Just imagine what elections will be like when we’re no longer able to trust video and audio. But some researchers are now fighting back and showing that AI can also be used for good.
“AI has many ethical problems,” said Francesco Nucci, applications research director at the Engineering Group, based in Italy. “But sometimes it can also be the solution. You can use AI in unethical ways to for example make and spread fake news, but you can also use it to do good, for example, to combat misinformation.”
Fact-checkers
He is the principal researcher on the Fandango project, which aims to do just that. The team is building software tools to help journalists and fact-checkers detect and fight fake news, says Nucci. They hope to serve journalists in three ways.
The first component is what Nucci calls content-independent detection by using tools which target the form of the content.
