Tag: Disinformation

“For us in journalism there are many potential uses and some very obvious dangers. It’s an opportunity and a potential threat and it’s happening whether we like it or not, and so very fast.” Lenore Taylor These are remarks edited…

“It has also underlined one of the challenges raised by generative AI for news organisations. We, like others, will learn and adapt.” Ruadhan Mac Cormaic, editor of Irish Times The Guardian reports on an incident involving Irish Times and a…

“Experts fear the technology could hasten an erosion of trust in media, in government and in society. If any image can be manufactured — and manipulated — how can we believe anything we see?” Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers…

“. . . the question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can this technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from…

“…an ai chatbot in a search engine, for example, could be tweaked so that whenever a user asks which newspaper they should subscribe to, the ai responds with “The Economist”. That might not sound so bad, but similar attacks could also cause an ai to spout…

“The idea is not to teach the AI the right answer to every question — an impossible feat. The goal would be to teach it to identify patterns in the petabytes of internet content that are associated with accuracy and…

“It may seem counterintuitive for a publication like Wired to have a policy of mostly not using AI,” Lichfield told me. “But I think people appreciate both the transparency and the attempt to define clear standards that emphasize what quality journalism is…

 “Over at The Verge, staff are ‘on guard,’ editor Nilay Patel tells me, while noting that this isn’t the first time newsrooms have geared up for a deluge of deepfakes. ‘What our newsroom took away from 2020 was that the…

‘Reporters can feed images into Assembler, which has seven “detectors,” each one built to spot a specific type of photo-manipulation technique.’ Google subsidiary Jigsaw has developed a tool to help newsrooms detect deceitful images, reports THE NEW YORK TIMES. Called…

“Our goal was to use the most advanced artificial intelligence techniques available today to create the most believable result possible—and then point to it and say, ‘This is fake; here’s how we did it; and here’s why we did it”…

‘It’s meant to work quickly out of fear that a viral deepfake will need almost immediate identification and response.’ ‘Soft biometrics’ may help distinguish real video from imitations, says a research team at University of California, Berkeley. They’ve studied hundreds…

Facebook AI is releasing 100,000+ videos as a training set for its $10 million challenge to help detect deep fakes. Each video presents real people with a fake counterpart. The challenge is to create automated tools that can identify deceitful…

‘False news tends to be less grammatical and less factual, with greater reliance on emotionally charged claims, misleading headlines and so on.’ Penn state researchers hope more precise definitions of ‘fake news’ will assist further research, improve detection measures, and…

‘The mere idea of AI-synthesized media is already making people stop believing that real things are real.’ Undermining trust in media is a greater danger than actual deception, says a detailed study of misinformation by Deeptrace Labs, a cybersecurity firm…

‘Google’s videos should be useful, since many of them appear to be incredibly realistic, especially to users who have no point of reference.’ Google is adding to a growing effort to combat deepfakes, reports SILICON ANGLE. Concerns are mounting about…

‘…after careful monitoring, OpenAI had not yet found any attempts of malicious use but had seen multiple beneficial applications, including in code autocompletion, grammar help, and developing question-answering systems for medical assistance.’ CONTEXT GPT-2, a text-generating AI model, created headlines…

‘…it’s likely to be a long while before machines can really converse with us. Language is deceptively difficult for machines to make sense of, in part because of its compositional complexity: words can be rearranged to unlock infinite meaning.’ US…

Practice your fake-spotting skills in this DIY drill. It’s from a university course named ‘Calling Bullshit’ at University of Washington. Each face-off pairs pictures from two databases: Real images from Flickr, fakes from thispersondoesnotexist.com, a demonstration site that shows images…

‘According to results of their own research, (the system) helped to improve the detection-rate of forged text from 54 percent to 72 percent’  Computer generated text has ‘tells’ that distinguish it from human writing, reports THE DAILY MAIL. Researchers at…

Deep fakes could become more sophisticated in the 2020 U.S. election and that has the Wall Street Journal on a proactive footing, reports DIGIDAY UK. ‘We decided it was a threat to our news gathering process,‘ says WSJ R&D chief…

The Washington Post says manipulated media comes in three forms: Missing context Deceptive editing Malicious transformation The Post provides a special page with examples of each as part of it DIY guide to detecting fakery in news content and sourcing….

Runs 29:34 Keynote talk by Google news founder Krishna Bharat at the 2019 Global Editors Summit. Bharat says journalism is the ‘immune system of democracy.’ AI tools will benefit the practice of journalism — and by extension, democracy — but…

The ability to create synthetic videos outweighs detection methods by ‘100 to 1’, according to a digital forensics professor at UC Berkeley quoted in THE WASHINGTON POST. The US public is not ready for the possible consequences of deepfakes in…

‘The researchers conclude that a greater global effort is needed to work on ways of detecting and responding to AI-generated content.’ With $7.80 in computer time and 13 hours of human effort, two UN researcher coaxed an AI system to…

10,000 deepfakes may be circulating online, as ‘synthetic media’ keeps getting easier to make and harder to detect. Writing in MEDIUM, Tom Van de Weghe, a foreign correspondent for VRT, summarizes his research about deepfakes while he was a Knight…

DIGIDAY UK reports how Reuters created its own fake video to test its in-house verification team and step-up its ability to detect deepfakes. ‘In the last two years, Reuters has doubled the number of people who work on verifying video…

‘The problem is our technology has become more and more sophisticated, but our thinking on what is free speech and what does a free market economy look like has not become as sophisticated.’ Futurist Amy Webb MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW interviews…

‘The ability to use machine learning to simulate an individual saying or doing almost anything poses personal and political risks that societies around the world are ill-equipped to guard against.’ IN THE WASHINGTON POST the editorial board warns that algorithm-generated…

‘Here are some things you can look for when trying to recognize an image produced by a GAN.’ MEDIUM provides several examples of ‘tells’ for fake imagery. They include incongruous backgrounds, asymmetrical body parts, peculiar hair treatments, and others. SEE…

“Raising awareness in the newsroom about the latest technology is critical,” said Christine Glancey, a deputy editor on the Ethics & Standards team who spearheaded the forensics committee. “We don’t know where future deepfakes might surface so we want all eyes…