This is Brian Laird's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Thursday, January 8th.

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.

Open AI and Google both dropped bands 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 guard rails around AI and misinformation came off.

What actually changed and why did it happen so quickly?

...