“Every share becomes fuel for algorithms that learn not what is true, but what is sticky. Misinformation thrives because people unknowingly train systems to serve them more of it. In that sense, AI does not just respond to demand for misinformation. It sharpens it. It shapes it. Increasingly, it manufactures it.”
– Susan D’Agostino
In Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, author and mathematician Susan D’Agostino argues reversing misinformation requires intervention on both the supply and demand sides. She says AI accelerates and amplifies false information but that’s only half the story.
She believes people need to be offered not only corrections but better alternatives – “a more coherent narrative, a more trustworthy source, or a place where identity and truth are no longer at odds.”
Susan D’Agostino is a science writer and mathematician who also has held journalism fellowships focused on AI at Columbia, Oxford’s Reuters Institute, and the Mila-Quebec AI Institute. She is the author and illustrator of How To Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Susan D’Agostino: AI is polluting truth in journalism. Here’s how to disrupt the misinformation feedback loop | BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENCES | July 14, 2025 | by Susan D’Agostino