AI image misinformation has surged, Google researchers find
Some researchers say that fake images generated by AI have proliferated so quickly that they’re now nearly as common as those manipulated by text or traditional editing tools.
Fake images generated by artificial intelligence have proliferated so quickly that they’re now nearly as common as those manipulated by text or traditional editing tools like Photoshop, according to researchers at Google and several fact-checking organizations.
The findings offer an indication of just how quickly the technology has been embraced by people seeking to spread false information. But researchers warned that AI is still just one way in which pictures are used to mislead the public — the most common continues to be real images taken out of context.
In a paper released online this month but not yet peer-reviewed, the researchers tracked misinformation trends by analyzing nearly 136,000 fact-checks dating back to 1995, with the majority of them published after 2016 and ending in November 2023. They found that AI accounted for very little image-based misinformation until spring of 2023, right around when fake photos of Pope Francis in a puffer coat went viral.
“The sudden prominence of AI-generated content in fact checked misinformation claims suggests a rapidly changing landscape,” the researchers wrote.
The lead researchers and representatives for Google did not comment in time for publication.
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