Fake Journalists Are the Latest Disinformation Twist

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Last week The Daily Beast broke some bizarre news. Several news outlets, including The Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, and The National Interest, had been running op-eds of journalists that did not exist. AI generated photos attached to profiles and credentials that, once scrutinized, collapsed. It was a massive effort at digital propaganda and questions still remain about its provenance and purpose.

Here to explain just what is going on is Marc Owen Jones. Jones is an assistant professor in Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University and an expert in social media disinformation who helped sound the alarm about this campaign.

Recorded 7/13/20
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Media literacy in Estonia and Finland
A website that generates people who don’t exist

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
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0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:23.0	It appeared that at least another half of the accounts were using of images generated by artificial intelligence.
0:26.0	Now this is very straightforward to do now.
0:28.0	You can go to the website,
0:29.0	this person does not exist.com,
0:31.0	and every two minutes it will generate a very very believable fake face using
0:37.1	artificial intelligence and you could just keep clicking until you find the face
0:40.9	that you like and then use that as your profile picture.
0:43.6	You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the
0:57.2	front lines.
0:58.8	Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to war College. I'm Matthew Gault. And I'm Jason Field.
1:17.0	Last week, the Daily Beast broke some bizarre news. Several news outlets, including the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Markets, and the national interest,
1:26.2	have been running op-eds of journalists that didn't exist. Not just that their articles didn't exist, the information was bad, the journalists themselves did not exist. AI generated photos attached to profiles and credentials that, once scrutinized, collapsed. It was a massive effort at digital propaganda and questions still remain
1:45.6	about its provenance and purpose. Here to explain just what is going on is Mark Owen Jones. Jones is an assistant professor in Middle East
1:54.3	Studies in Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University and an expert in
1:58.8	social media disinformation. He helped sound the alarm about this campaign. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.
2:06.0	Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be on the podcast.
2:10.0	So give us the broad strokes of what happened here. Again, like I said earlier, this is not just fake news stories, but fake journalists as well.
2:19.0	Yeah, absolutely.
	...

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