Truth or lies?

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said he is “worried that these LLMs will be used for large-scale disinformation.” In an age of deepfakes, bots, digital twins, and replicas, we are increasingly being denied a clear and confident understanding of the truth. It’s being fueled by technological change accelerating at an unprecedented rate with new tools that make the truth ever more elusive. Moreover, the impact of this change has ramifications that are yet to be fully understood.  

Rapid disinformation attacks—i.e., attacks in which disinformation is unleashed quickly and broadly to create an immediate disruptive effect—are one of the most significant challenges we face today. We’ve seen the impact of disinformation in past presidential elections and the blind spread of widely disproved conspiracy theories.

The ability to spread disinformation is getting easier and dramatically more effective. Generative AI (GAI) now offers the ability to target. Past campaigns were run by foreign actors who often had little cultural or English language fluency. Natural language processing has eliminated that problem opening the door for foreign actors.

With GAI tools, anyone can run disinformation content campaigns finely tuned and highly believable by profiling individuals and groups and replicating their vernacular, personalities, tone, and manner. This new tech can be woven into bots and deepfake videos and images of real people producing content that appears legitimate, relatable, and highly credible. All this makes disinformation infinitely more sharable and dangerous. 

Scarier still, GAI supports the ability to target specific individuals with personalized disinformation, indistinguishable from the real deal. People will not know whether what they are being served is legitimate or not. The general population is light on fact-checking and believing what they want to believe.

GAI is making it much easier to produce disinformation at scale with speed and efficiency and with a level of realism never before seen. Get ready. This crap will be free-flowing this coming election.

Truth? Lies? It’s going to be hard to tell. Are you ready?