Combating Misinformation in the Age of Generative AI : Current Trends and Future Challenges

The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionizing and transforming a wide range of fields, with a notable impact on digital media and information dissemination. Digital platforms, including social media networks, have already grappled with the widespread proliferation of fake news at an increasing intensity and are now facing an even bigger threat from machine-generated and machine-boosted fake news. With the increasing growth and sophistication of GenAI models for malicious ends, fake news is spreading rapidly, finding a fertile ground in digital media for largely unchecked dissemination of incorrect and misleading information. The scalability and diversity of current and emerging GenAI techniques present both opportunities and challenges in the field of fake news. On the one hand, the ability to create highly realistic and persuasive content in large quantities with minimal effort, in real-time, makes GenAI a potent tool for spreading fake news and misinformation. On the other hand, those same capabilities can be harnessed to employ GenAI models to detect fake news and, therefore, hinder the spread. In this context, this book examines how GenAI techniques are contributing to combat fake news in digital media. A particular major challenge in combating fake news with GenAI is the explainability of the models: why a specific piece of news is determined to be fake or genuine. Tracing the origins of a specific piece of generated content—whether it stems from accurate or misleading data—requires extracting, interpreting, and representing in a legible manner vast parameter spaces and training data sources. This complexity of GenAI explainability makes it difficult to hold creators of fake news accountable and to ensure transparency in the content creation process. The authors focus on the positive potential of GenAI and provide an overview of how it can be leveraged to combat fake news across diverse digital media platforms. The book is structured around