ISD’s Elise Thomas for Lawfare: Gen AI will increase misinformation about disinformation

Elise Thomas, OSINT Senior Analyst at ISD, wrote an op-ed for Lawfare on how generative AI amplifies misinformation by producing false claims about disinformation itself, making it harder to identify disinformation operations. She emphasises the need for journalists and experts to “slow down on reporting”. Elise uses the recent case of Linda Reynolds, Australia’s former Defense Minister, who is pursuing a high-profile defamation case against former staffer Brittany Higgins, a former staffer who was allegedly raped by a colleague in Reynold’s office in 2019. Reynold’s had to publicly deny any involvement with a network of bots on X that were posting in support of Reynolds.

“This case also demonstrates that AI content doesn’t actually need to be convincing in order to have an effect. The tweets from these accounts created an impact precisely because they weren’t fooling anyone, affirming the preexisting political beliefs of the X users who came across them (in that they were prepared to believe that Reynolds might have hired bots). This became the impetus that drove the initial online engagement and kick-started the traditional media cycle. It wasn’t the beliefs or intentions of the people behind the tweets that made the difference in this case—it was the beliefs of the people who saw them. 

AI is about to significantly increase uncertainty in disinformation research, in an already highly uncertain field. Disinformation operations will be harder to identify, harder to map out, and harder to attribute. People have a tendency to interpret uncertainty in a way that affirms their biases, irrespective of evidence or the lack thereof. Similarly, the strong incentives for journalists and experts to brush over uncertainty and race to beat their competitors will remain the same. No one gets paid to say, “I don’t know” or “this isn’t a story.” There is a real risk that the consequence of these cumulative factors will be increasingly widespread misinformation about disinformation.” 

The full article is available on Lawfare’s website.