By Alex Sventeckis

Ethan Mollick, professor of management at Wharton Business School, has a simple benchmark for tracking the progress of AI’s image generation capabilities: “Otter on a plane using wifi.”

Mollick uses that prompt to create images of … an otter using Wi-Fi on an airplane. Here are his results from a generative AI image tool around November 2022.

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And here is his result in August 2024.

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AI image and video creation have come a long way in a short time. With access to the right tools and resources, you can manufacture a video in hours (or even minutes) that would’ve otherwise taken days with a creative team. AI can help almost anybody create polished visual content that feels real — even if it isn’t.

Of course, AI is only a tool. And like any tool, it reflects the intent of the person wielding it.

For every aerial otter enthusiast, there’s someone else creating deepfakes of presidential candidates. And it’s not only visuals: Models can generate persuasive articles in bulk, clone human voices, and create entire fake social media accounts. Misinformation at scale used to take serious operations, time, and expenses. Now, anyone with a decent internet connection can manufacture the truth.

In a world where AI can quickly generate polished content at scale, social media becomes the perfect delivery system. And AI’s impact on social media can’t be ignored.

Misinformation is no longer just about low-effort memes lost in the dark corners of the web. Slick, personalized, emotionally charged AI content is misinformation’s future. To understand the implications, let’s dive deeper into social media misinformation and AI’s role on both sides of the misinformation fence.

Social Media Misinformation Today

What is misinformation?

Before I begin, I should note how I’ll discuss the term “misinformation.” Technically speaking, this issue has a few different flavors:

• Misinformation is false information shared without the intent to deceive. It’s usually spread accidentally because people believe it’s true. When your uncle shares a fake news story on Facebook, that’s misinformation.
• Disinformation is false information shared deliberately to mislead, manipulate, or harm a person or persons. Its purpose is often to create political, social, or financial gain. Think bad state actors or troll farms meant to deceive intentionally.
• Malinformation is when someone shares true information intending to cause harm, often by taking it out of context. It’s a real story used maliciously. For example, someone leaking private emails to smear a public figure is malinformation.

For our purposes, I’ll focus on misinformation as much as possible and will note differences otherwise.

Social Media Misinformation: A Brief History

The fact that we need distinctions hints at the scope and scale of social media misinformation today. False or inaccurate printed content has existed since the Gutenberg printing press.

The advent of newspapers also …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron