The Double-Edged Sword of AI: Enabler of Disinformation

The tendency to consume news on social media platforms has greatly increased over the last decade. Information can now be disseminated quickly, cheaply, and with easy access for consumers; this has rapidly boosted decentralized news production, often without editorial oversight. Adversarial agents are exploiting this situation to spread disinformation. Over the past ten years, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) has experienced unprecedented growth in the development of applications for the automation of text, and the recognition and generation of visual and audio data. Do these burgeoning AI capabilities boost the abilities of malicious actors to manipulate crowds? AI now plays a vital role in generating synthetic content and enables the efficient micro-targeting used on social media platforms to spread disinformation messages, including hyper-realistic synthetic images, videos, audios, and text. This rather technical article has been written to inform practitioners, policymakers, and AI enthusiasts in NATO about how AI / ML technologies can be used to shape disinformation.