“Today, infox proliferate, and this in unparalleled proportions, and artificial intelligence plays a major part in it”, notes in his new column the researcher Jean-Gabriel Ganascia.
This article is taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche n°912, dated February 2023.
The misinformation has been around for a very long time. Those who condemn it sometimes incriminate the will to harm of the transmitters, sometimes the appetite for sensationalism, the vulnerability and the credulity of the receivers, sometimes again the greed of certain unscrupulous media who seek to increase their audience by broadcasting pleasant nonsense. Nothing new here!
However, today, infox (or fake news) proliferate, and this in unequaled proportions, and artificial intelligence takes a major part in it. To understand this, remember that in the past, to ensure their profitability, the mass media forged sensational messages likely to appeal to the widest audiences. With social networks, things are different: users issue or relay information that will have to find those who will “gobble” it and spread it. The media then play the role of facilitator by directing the messages as well as possible.
Texts, sounds and images are now generated at will
To this end, they determine, for each piece of news, its status, in particular its meaning and affective tone; they then identify the segments of the public most likely to welcome it and react to it; finally, they pass it on to them. These operations use artificial intelligence to categorize messages, profile users, then to match profiles and messages in order to target audiences sensitive to a particular subject.
Very recently, and this is the great novelty, artificial intelligence is also involved in production: with “generative adversarial networks” on the one hand and large language models such as GPT on the other, texts, sounds and images are generated at will, in such a way as to delude and deceive, which further increases, and in disproportionate proportions, the potential number of false[…]
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