Producing fake information is getting easier
But that’s not the whole story, when it comes to AI
When it comes to disinformation, “social media took the cost of distribution to zero, and generative AI takes the cost of generation to zero,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Large language models such as GPT-4 make it easy to produce misleading news articles or social-media posts in huge quantities.
And AI can produce more than text. Cloning a voice using AI used to require minutes, or even hours, of sample audio. Last year, however, researchers at Microsoft unveiled VALL-E, an AI model that is able to clone a person’s voice from just a three-second clip of them speaking, and make it say any given text.
Explore more
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Generation confusion"
More from Science and technology
The Great Barrier Reef is seeing unprecedented coral bleaching
Continued global warming will mean its obliteration
Some corals are better at handling the heat
Scientists are helping them breed
Today’s AI models are impressive. Teams of them will be formidable
Working together will make LLMs more capable and intelligent—for good and ill