Washington Post: The rise of AI fake news
UC social media expert Jeffrey Blevins makes the media rounds on the topic of fake news
According to an article in the Washington Post, since May 2023, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent.
The article focuses on AI having the ability to be a misinformation superspreader and quotes leading misinformation experts, to include UC’s Jeffery Blevins, a professor in both the Department of Journalism and Department of Public and International Affairs (SPIA).
Just because a website claims to be a news organization, doesn’t mean that it has ‘real’ journalists running the operation, Blevins tells The Post, adding that having real and AI-generated news side-by-side makes deceptive stories more believable.
“It’s misleading,” he says, because not everyone is media savvy enough to tell the difference.
And it doesn’t help that AI is becoming easier to use and harder to distinguish whether the news is being generated by a spy agency or a teenager in a basement, the article states.
Photo iStock Photo.
For now, there are still some ways to tell whether an article is written by AI, says Blevins, citing things to look out for that might indicate its AI such as “really odd grammar” or poor sentence construction.
The best way to combat the deception, he says, is to improved media literacy among the average reader.
Blevins is a leading scholar in U.S. telecommunication law and policy, and critical political economy theory and is the co-author of “Social Media, Social Justice and the Political Economy of Online Networks.” He is a trusted media resource, and he has provided expertise on electronic media regulation and Federal Communications Commission policymaking to international, national, regional and local news media.
Read the Washington Post article: The rise of AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’
Blevins was also a cited expert in a Raw Story article: ‘Too preposterous to be real’: College hires ‘pink slime’ publisher as journalism prof
Additionally, Blevins appeared as a guest on Arirang News, Korea's largest English-language television network: War against fake news: S. Korea's one-strike policy
Featured photo at top of Jeffrey Blevins by Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand.
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