Article by Maggie Harrison: “Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet” has been pretty standard advice for quite some time now. And according to a new report from European law enforcement group Europol, we have all the reason in the world to step up that vigilance.
“Experts estimate that as much as 90 percent of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026,” the report warned, adding that synthetic media “refers to media generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence.”
“In most cases, synthetic media is generated for gaming, to improve services or to improve the quality of life,” the report continued, “but the increase in synthetic media and improved technology has given rise to disinformation possibilities.”…
The report focused pretty heavily on disinformation, notably that driven by deepfake technology. But that 90 percent figure raises other questions, too — what do AI systems like Dall-E and GPT-3 mean for artists, writers, and other content-generating creators? And circling back to disinformation once more, what will the dissemination of information, not to mention the consumption of it, actually look like in an era driven by that degree of AI-generated digital stuff?…(More)’