philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Generative AI Is Playing a Surprising Role in Israel-Hamas Disinformation

... Primarily, Mashkoor says, AI-generated disinformation is being used by activists to solicit support—or give the impression of wider support—for a particular side. Examples include an AI-generated billboard in Tel Aviv championing Israel Defense Forces, an Israeli account sharing fake images of people cheering for the IDF, an Israeli influencer using AI to generate condemnations of Hamas, and AI images portrayingvictims of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“In terms of general use that I’ve been seeing online, it’s mostly been to drum up support, which is not among the most malicious ways to utilize AI right now,” she says.

A key factor here is the sheer amount of misinformation circulating, which makes it difficult for AI images to shape conversation. ...

Setting aside the apocalyptic view, it’s easier to study how generative AI has actually slotted into the existing disinformation ecosystem. It is, for example, far more prevalent than it was at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, argues Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. ...

“For a lot of people, the ability to dismiss inconvenient facts is absolutely playing a role in this conflict,” he says.

Some of the most prominent examples of this are the photos of burned children Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on his X account. After they were published, someone fed the images into the detection tool AI or Not, which the users said determined that they were AI. Farid says his team analyzed the photos and concluded AI wasn't used, but the seed of suspicion had already been planted. Things were further confused when someone used AI to replace the child in one of the images with a puppy. ...

In other words, this distribution follows a historic pattern: Misinformation gets shared on social media, then amplified via algorithms and humans. “In the broader picture, in our ability to reason about a fast-moving highly impactful world, I think this conflict is worse than what we’ve seen in the past,” says Farid. “And I think gen AI is part of that, but it is not exclusively gen AI. That’s too simplistic.”

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/israel-hamas-war-generative-artificial-intelligence-disinformation/