It's the Brian Lear Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

I'm Amina Serna, sitting in for Brian today.

Now we're going to turn to something that's getting harder and harder

to avoid online. AI generated content. In a lot of ways, 2025 felt like the year AI really hit

a fever pitch. Suddenly, it wasn't just a novelty. It was everywhere in our feeds, our messages,

our search results, even our news.

And at the same time, many of the guardrails that were supposed to keep things in check

started coming off. Facebook ended its fact-checking program in the U.S.

with Mark Zuckerberg saying facts had become too politicized and replaced it with community notes instead. OpenAI and Google both

dropped bans on photorealistic images of real people, opening the door to far more convincing

deepfakes. And the industry as a whole remains largely unregulated. The result is that we're seeing

much more AI generated content than ever before,

and it's getting harder to tell what's real, what's fake, and what's deliberately misleading.

So as we kick off the new year here on the Brian Lair show,

we want to start making sense of this digital confusion,

and to give you some practical tools to navigate it more carefully.

Joining us now is Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator, a publication dedicated to investing

digital deception. Craig, welcome to WNYC.

Hello, thanks for having me.

You wrote an article last month that described 2025 as a turning point in the tech world.

The year, a lot of the guardrails around AI and misinformation came off.

...