{"id":12708,"date":"2024-04-18T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-18T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/fakes-deepfakes-and-chatbots-how-to-spot-ai-manipulation-online\/"},"modified":"2024-04-18T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-04-18T14:00:00","slug":"fakes-deepfakes-and-chatbots-how-to-spot-ai-manipulation-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/fakes-deepfakes-and-chatbots-how-to-spot-ai-manipulation-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Fakes, deepfakes and chatbots: how to spot AI manipulation online"},"content":{"rendered":"
Lies, deceit and manipulation have been with humanity since antiquity. With the rise of mass media, makers of fakes gained the ability to reach unprecedented audiences.<\/p>\n
In the era of the rapidly expanding internet, disinformation has taken new forms. Websites, social networks, image boards and even traditional media have become venues for spreading false and manipulative claims. The risk may become acute in a new technological age\u2014the age of artificial intelligence. Or does truth still have a chance to survive?<\/p>\n
Bohdan Kaminsky explains how disinformation spreads, the role AI plays and what to expect next. <\/p>\n
A brief history<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Disinformation has long been a weapon in the hands of governments and intelligence services. The problem became especially acute during the cold war. The Soviet Union and the United States did not hesitate to manipulate data and interfere with information flows in order to blacken each other in the eyes of their own citizens.<\/p>\n
The fall of the Berlin Wall might have eased tensions; it did not. Governments continued to distort the information space to suit their interests, using every tool at their disposal.<\/p>\n
The end of the cold war coincided with the rapid spread of the internet, especially in Eastern Europe. As the machinery of censorship collapsed, a torrent of information washed over the former socialist bloc, making it ever harder for ordinary citizens to tell truth from falsehood.<\/p>\n
The mid-2000s advent of social networks marked a new phase in the evolution of fakes and manipulation. The information space\u2014and its audience\u2014expanded so much that without careful fact-checking it became far harder to separate trustworthy reports from bunk.<\/p>\n
New capabilities <\/strong><\/h2>\n
Artificial intelligence developed alongside the internet, but its broad adoption in daily life came much later. One reason for the delay was high cost and the need for hefty computing power.<\/p>\n
The situation changed dramatically in November 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT for public use. Transformer-based language models existed before, but this product, built on GPT-3, gave virtually any smartphone owner access to a modern chatbot.<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, users began probing its limits. Fake posts, news items, songs, poems and other texts appeared online, spun up with AI. The service can generate vast volumes of prose in seconds on demand.<\/p>\n
It did not stop at text. OpenAI also built the DALL-E series of image generators, capable of creating realistic pictures. Although Sam Altman\u2019s tool has not yet been involved in disinformation scandals, rival platforms MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have.<\/p>\n
In March 2023 the internet lit up with pictures of Pope Francis supposedly strutting the streets in a Balenciaga puffer. The images, it turned out, were generated by AI.<\/p>\nPope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer, generated by AI. Source: Forbes<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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