From NBC News
AI is intensifying a ‘collapse’ of trust online, experts say
By Angela Yang
For years, people could largely trust, at least instinctively, that seeing was believing. Now, what’s fake often looks real and what’s real often looks fake.
Within the first week of 2026, that has already become a conundrum many media experts say will be hard to move past, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence.
President Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in her car, many online circulated a fake, most likely AI-edited image of the scene that appears to be based on real video. Others used AI in attempts to digitally remove the mask of the ICE officer who shot her...
Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the UC Berkeley School of Information, said his recent research on deepfake detection has found that people are just as likely to say something real is fake as they are to say something fake is real. The accuracy rate worsens significantly when people are shown content with political undertones — because then confirmation bias kicks in.
“When I send you something that conforms to your worldview, you want to believe it. You’re incentivized to believe it,” Farid said. “And if it’s something that contradicts your worldview, you’re highly incentivized to say, ‘Oh, that’s fake.’ And so when you add that partisanship onto it, it blows everything out of the water...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
