#misinformation
20 stories taggedmisinformation.
China Is the Data Center Villain That Techies Love to Blame. The Evidence Disagrees.
Polling shows three-quarters of Americans now oppose local data centers. Politicians and tech figures blame China. But social media researchers say the anger is homegrown.
AI-Generated Fake Research Is Flooding Australia's Parliamentary Inquiry System
Submissions to government committees are citing studies that don't exist and attributing them to real academics, with some reports built largely on invented sources.
Voters Are Worried About AI in Politics. Here's What Good AI Campaigning Actually Looks Like
While deepfakes and propaganda grab the headlines, a quieter question goes unanswered: could AI help politicians actually listen to the people they represent?
Trump's AI selfies with Washington and Lincoln: what's actually going on
Facing low approval ratings and a stalled Iran conflict, the US president is posting AI-generated images of himself alongside historical figures. It's a PR move that says a lot about how politicians now use artificial intelligence.
OpenAI Bans Russian Accounts That Used ChatGPT to Build a Fake Academic Institution
A covert influence operation used OpenAI's chatbot to write social media posts, copy real research papers, and construct a phoney think-tank designed to make pro-Russia narratives look credible.
AI Fakes Are Poisoning the One Corner of the Internet People Trusted Most: Animals
From lost-pet scams to faked rescue footage, AI-generated animal imagery is eroding public trust in real conservation work and breaking the hearts of owners still searching for their pets.
A fake US think tank flooded AI chatbots with half a million words of pro-Israel talking points
A website posing as a research institute published 124 reports in nine days, using a platform built to make AI chatbots treat its content as credible source material.
One in three web pages published since ChatGPT launched now shows signs of AI authorship
A Pew Research study of nearly half a million web pages found that 35% of those published after November 2022 carry signs of AI writing. Meanwhile, bots are also doing most of the browsing.
Jill Lepore's New Book Says AI Is Already Dismantling Democracy. Is She Right?
A Pulitzer-winning historian argues that big tech's grip on public life is not a future threat but a present reality, and her new book spells out exactly what that looks like.
Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Report Used ChatGPT for Editing, Authors Admit
A $3.48 million government-funded study into age-checking technology contains citations to academic articles that do not appear to exist. The authors say AI did not invent them.
A Peer Reviewer Missed the Point of a Vaccine Study. AI Might Make That Worse.
When a health economist found that school HPV vaccine mandates barely move the needle on cervical cancer rates, his peer reviewer thought he was attacking the vaccine itself. That kind of misread is common. AI-generated reviews could make it routine.
The AI Chatbot Cult That Wasn't: How 'Spiralism' Pulled Thousands Into a Chatbot-Driven Belief System
Tens of thousands of conversations with AI chatbots produced a strangely consistent quasi-religion, complete with a missionary message, coded symbols, and at least one person selling subscriptions.
Brands Are Flooding Reddit With Fake Reviews So AI Chatbots Pick Them Up. Moderators Are Fighting Back.
AI search tools cite Reddit more than any news site or Wikipedia. Marketers noticed. Now a quiet war is playing out between promotional bots and the volunteer moderators trying to keep communities honest.
The EU Now Requires Companies to Label AI Chatbots and Deepfakes
New rules that took effect on 2 August 2025 force any company operating in Europe to tell users when they are talking to an AI, or viewing AI-generated content. Fines of up to €15 million are on the table for those that ignore them.
Google Pulls Its AI Image-Editing Tool from Google Earth After Users Faked War Zones and Border Scenes
A feature that let anyone repaint satellite photos with text prompts lasted less than 48 hours before Google yanked it. The reason: researchers showed it could generate convincing fake imagery of real places, and at least one AI detection tool was fooled.