philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Fake news generated by artificial intelligence can be convincing enough to trick even experts

The results of a new study could set off an AI arms race between misinformation generators and detectors.

Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine.

There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as faculty members doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community. We found that it is possible for artificial intelligence systems to generate false information in critical fields like medicine and defence that is convincing enough to fool experts.

To test this threat, we studied the impacts of spreading misinformation in the cybersecurity and medical communities. We used artificial intelligence models dubbed transformers to generate false cybersecurity news and Covid-19 medical studies and presented the cybersecurity misinformation to cybersecurity experts for testing. We found that transformer-generated misinformation was able to fool cybersecurity experts.

Misinformation arms race

Although examples like these from our study can be fact-checked, transformer-generated misinformation hinders such industries as health care and cybersecurity in adopting AI to help with information overload.

See the full story here: https://scroll.in/article/997898/fake-news-generated-by-artificial-intelligence-can-be-convincing-enough-to-trick-even-experts