Big Tech doesn’t cause misinformation or truth decay
Simon et al. 23 (Felix M. Simon, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Sacha Altay, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Hugo Mercier, Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, PSL University, CNRS, France. “Misinformation reloaded? Fears about the impact of generative AI on misinformation are overblown” 10/18/2023. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/misinformation-reloaded-fears-about-the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-misinformation-are-overblown/)
First, it seems that it would already be relatively easy for producers of misinformation to increase the perceived reliability of their content. In the realm of visuals, Photoshop has long afforded bad actors the ability to make an artificially created image look real (Kapoor & Narayanan, 2023). If they opt not to do so, it might be because making a text or image look more reliable or real might conflict with other goals, such as making the same more accessible, appealing, or seemingly authentic. It’s not clear that generative AIs could increase content quality on multiple dimensions, as there might be some unavoidable tradeoffs.
Second, even if generative AI managed to increase the overall appeal of misinformation, most people are simply not exposed, or only very marginally exposed, to misinformation (see above and Acerbi et al., 2022). Instead, most people overwhelmingly consume content from mainstream sources, typically the same handful of popular media outlets (Altay et al., 2022; Guess et al., 2021). As a result, any increase in the quality of misleading content would be largely invisible to most of the public.
Third, generative AI could also help increase the quality of reliable news sources—for instance, by facilitating the work of journalists in some areas. Given the rarity of misleading content compared to reliable content, the increase in the appeal of misinformation would have to be 20 to 100 times larger than the increase in the appeal of reliable content for the effects of generative AI to tip the scales in favor of misinformation (Acerbi et al., 2022). We are not aware of an argument that would suggest such a massive imbalance in the effects of generative AI on misinformation and on reliable information.