What’s real and what’s fake when it comes to social media?
A question that may be harder to answer now thanks to the increasing ability of artificial intelligence technology.
According to The Independent website, AI-generated deepfakes showing Donald Trump running from law enforcement officers resisting arrest have flooded Twitter the last few days with fabricated images, that have been viewed by at least four million people.
And now a new study is out that shows how AI, artificial intelligence, is making it harder to know what is real and what is not.
Scientists from a Business School conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to differentiate between real and fake social media profiles. The fake accounts were created and maintained by AI technology.
They found that most of the people in the study could not tell the difference between artificially generated fake Twitter accounts and real ones. The researchers even found that the participants in the study tended to mistakenly think the AI social media accounts were less likely to be fake than the real ones.
Said one of the researchers, “…the technology for creating generated fake profiles has advanced to such a point that it is difficult to distinguish them from real profiles.”
This study is the latest indication of the growing and wider debate about artificial intelligence and what it could mean to knowing what truth is and what it is not. And that is very scary.
(Photo Getty Images)