Warning: Powered by AI, fake news will just get worse

We all know the about Facebook debacle. And we all know that the political world was influenced by fake news. So rest back and take this news seriously — Fake news will get a lot worse in future and AI will be the biggest catalyst. This warning comes from an AI consultant that works for the CIA.

Sean Gourly, founder and CEO, Primer, told a conference in San Francisco that the next generation of fake news will be empowered by Artificial Intelligence and be far more sophisticated, and even more disastrous. Primer is a company that uses software to mine data sources and automatically generate reports for the CIA and other clients.

“The automation of the generation of fake news is going to make it very effective,” Gourley told the audience at EmTech Digital, organised by MIT Technology Review.

Facebook was at the centre of the fake news scandal where the social networking platform failed to prevent fake news on its platform. The fake news was created by Russian operatives and the resulting fake information was spread across millions of people before the 2016 presidential elections. And now after the unearthing of Cambridge Analytica’s dirty data breach scam, Facebook has been severely hit by the personal data mining issue.

Mark Zuckerberg had earlier suggested that the company would be using AI to spot fake news. But Gourly has a piece of alerting advice stating that the same AI could be used otherwise.

The AI company chief has noted that the present type of fake news being created is relatively simple as they are human-crafted stories posted online. However, with technology that Primer has today, the AI can be used to generate truly convincing fake stories and that too automatically, and at a faster level.

Click here to see a glimpse of how Gourly’s Primer has mastered AI to automatically create stories from a said database of information, without any human intervention. The fake stories and fake reports can be easily tailored to individual interests and carefully tested before being released, maximizing their impact. “I can generate a million stories, see which ones get the most traction, double down on those,” Gourley said.

He added that present fake news is only being fed into the social networking platform. But with the prowess of sophisticated AI, the fake information could take advantage of understanding network dynamics, as well as the mechanisms used to judge the popularity of content and could amplify a post’s effect with great ease.

“Where you inject information is going to have a massive impact on how it spreads and diffuses,” Gourley said. He went on to suggest that a platform like Facebook may be inherently flawed for sharing news. “All we’ve seen at the moment is primitive, and it’s had a profound impact, and more is coming,” he said.

Gourley did, however, agree that AI would be at least part of the solution. “If machines are going to produce it on one side,” he said, “then you’d better have machines helping you sift through it on the other.”

This concussion of AI-powered fake news and social media is huge possibility and could turn out to be disastrous. While AI is the best that has happened to technology, the wrong use of this power could cause a catastrophe ahead. AI needs to be well built, closely monitored and tightly secured so that it does not fall in the wrong hands.