AI-Generated Videos Fuel a New Wave of Misinformation, Hany Farid Tells PBS NewsHour

In the last few years, video and other content created with artificial intelligence have begun to flood almost every part of the internet. It has appeared everywhere from Spotify to the Kindle Store. But on social media, it is almost unavoidable. William Brangham takes a deep dive into the world of “AI slop.’

William Brangham:

“Have you seen these, cats competing in Olympic diving? What about this, a baby who somehow gets control of a jumbo jet, or this security camera footage of bunnies enjoying a homeowner’s trampoline?

Each of those has been seen hundreds of millions of times, and they are all fake. There are a type of artificially generated content that is flooding social media. Critics have dubbed it A.I. slop because it’s quick and easy to produce and created by artificial intelligence.

It’s not just flying babies and bouncing bunnies. Some of the fakery is being posted from the most powerful office in the country...”

Hany Farid, University of California, Berkeley: 

“We have always been able to manipulate images, audio and video. But what has changed is who can do it, how fast they can do it. There’s zero barrier to entry, and, of course, they now have distribution channels. This is anybody with a keyboard and Internet connection making any image, any video, anybody doing or saying anything and then distributing it to the world instantaneously through social media.

And that is a radically different landscape that we are facing than we have faced in the past.”