Reality Check Commentary: From Macedonian Teenagers to Multibillion-Dollar AI Models: Professionalizing Election Misinformation
NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz notes that tools to create believable fake claims have advanced dramatically since the 2016 election
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From Macedonian Teenagers to Multibillion-Dollar AI Models: Professionalizing Election Misinformation
By Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard Co-CEO
Ah, what a simpler time 2016 was, when a handful of enterprising teenagers made the town of Veles, Macedonia, famous. The high schoolers realized they could earn good money by making up crazy stories about then-presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and generating web traffic that delivered programmatic advertising revenues. They produced about 100 websites with names like 365USANews.com, spreading false claims, such as “BREAKING: Kenyan Government Releases Obama’s Real Birth Certificate.” One teenager came up with: “BREAKING: Obama Confirms Refusal to Leave White House, He Will Stay in Power!”
The BBC at the time quoted legitimate local journalist Ubavka Janevska: “I worry for young people's morality in Veles,” she said. “Since the US elections, all they think about is lies and making a fast buck from lies.”
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen published a spoof book in 2021 based on a trip to Veles, where he used GPT-2, an early version of artificial intelligence, to show what could happen if AI ever got good enough that people like the kids in Veles could use it to produce false claims more believably and at greater scale. Called “The Book of Veles,” he used AI-created text and AI-enhanced photos purporting to show people in Veles at work on misinformation websites. “What if,” WIRED reported him saying, AI “got good enough and simple enough that one person can sit in their basement” and create false claims at enormous scale.
Fast forward to 2024, the latest version of ChatGPT and other AI models provide the advanced tools that Bendiksen warned about in “The Book of Veles.” NewsGuard analyst Jack Brewster showed how a secretly partisan local website can be created for $105 and run itself through AI. NewsGuard analyst McKenzie Sadeghi discovered a disinformation operation from Moscow run by American fugitive John Mark Dougan publishing 167 Russian propaganda websites, powered by AI and masquerading as independent local news sites — and she then found that the top AI models spread Dougan’s false claims one-third of the time. In eight times out of 10, the AI models spread his false pro-Russia claim that there is a Ukrainian troll factory creating false stories to interfere with the U.S. election.
The U.S. presidential election is months away, but the NewsGuard 2024 Elections Misinformation Tracking Center is filling up. Consider it already includes 49 myths spreading across social media and identifies 129 sites spreading those myths.
Moreover, we have now tallied 1,265 partisan sites masquerading as politically independent local news outlets. These are secretly funded by political organizations without clear disclosure to readers and adopt innocuous names like “The Philadelphia Leader” or “The Copper Courier.” These left-wing and right-wing networks include States Newsroom, Courier Newsroom, Metric Media, as well as the Dougan Russian disinformation network. Adding his new websites to the mix means there are now more such “pink slime” sites than remaining daily newspaper in the U.S.
My NewsGuard colleagues and I are often asked if we think misinformation will be a problem with the U.S. election. Our answer is that it already is, powered by AI that has lowered the cost of creating false news and unreliable websites, and spread by AI whose models have a high propensity to spread falsehoods in the news. Thanks to AI lowering the barrier to misinformation, those Macedonian teenagers now have plenty of competitors.
Gordon Crovitz is the Co-CEO and Co-Editor-In-Chief of NewsGuard. Previously, he was publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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