Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop
Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer, a company that uses software to mine data sources and automatically generate reports for US intelligence agencies via In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s investment fund, told a conference in San Francisco that the next generation of fake news would be far more sophisticated thanks to AI.
“The automation of the generation of fake news is going to make it very effective,” Gourley told the audience at EmTech Digital, organized by MIT Technology Review.
Technology such as Primer’s could easily be used to generate convincing fake stories automatically, he said, and that could mean fake reports tailored to an individual’s interests and sympathies and carefully tested before being released, to maximize their impact. “I can generate a million stories, see which ones get the most traction, double down on those,” Gourley said.
Gourley added that fake news has so far been fed into social-media platforms like Facebook essentially at random. A more sophisticated understanding of network dynamics, as well as the mechanisms used to judge the popularity of content, could amplify a post’s effect.
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610635/fake-news-20-personalized-optimized-and-even-harder-to-stop/