Many feared that the 2024 election would be affected, and perhaps decided, by AI-generated disinformation. While there was some to be found, it was far less than anticipated. But don’t let that fool you: the disinfo threat is real — you’re just not the target.
So at least says Oren Etzioni, an AI researcher of long standing, whose nonprofit TrueMedia has its finger on the generated disinformation pulse.
“There is, for lack of a better word, a diversity of deepfakes,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Each one serves its own purpose, and some we’re more aware of than others. Let me put it this way: for every thing that you actually hear about, there are a hundred that are not targeted at you. Maybe a thousand. It’s really only the very tip of the iceberg that makes it to the mainstream press.”
The fact is that most people, and Americans more than most, tend to think that what they experience is the same as what others experience. That isn’t true for a lot of reasons. But in the case of disinformation campaigns, America is actually a hard target, given a relatively well -nformed populace, readily available factual information, and a press that is trusted at least most of the time (despite all the noise to the contrary).
We tend to think of deepfakes as something like a video of Taylor Swift doing or saying something she wouldn’t. But the really dangerous deepfakes are not the ones of celebrities or politicians, but of situations and people that can’t be so easily identified and counteracted.
“The biggest thing people don’t get is the variety. I saw one today of Iranian planes over Israel,” he noted — something that didn’t happen but can’t easily be disproven by someone not on the ground there. “You don’t see it because you’re not on the Telegram channel, or in certain WhatsApp groups — but millions are.”
TrueMedia offers a free service (via web and …