briefing·center

Press and media

View from briefing·center
Top stories

in brief

Just another weekend in post-truth America

The past few days have produced a litany of stories with a common theme: Is this true?

Let’s be clear: Lying is not new. People have been lying probably as long as there have been people, and while we can’t know, I’m going to guess that coveting was involved at the start.

Elections came later.

For centuries lying was strictly a face-to-face activity. Then came the breakthroughs: printing presses, radio, television, the internet — lies traveling at the speed of light.

Of course, now artificial intelligence offers the newest platform for one of humanity’s oldest moral failings.

Yes, people tout AI “tells,” and proffer AI-detection tests. But the fact is, it’s getting harder to know what’s true — particularly on social media sites whose profitability is linked to promoting falsehoods.

Did she really say that? Is the video real? Hard to say.

Those kittens are so cute. Can they really do that?

And while AI is viewed by many as a threat — to jobs and to humanity — traditionalists can find comfort in the fact that conventional lying is still going strong in this year’s political campaigns.

The lying epidemic is not going to be “solved” any time soon, and certainly not before the Nov. 3 election. And it’s not clear what the fix is, what tool can quiet the noise. It may require people to engage in the slow, hard work of rebuilding trust, face-to-face, and perhaps, down the road, institution-to-institution, community-to-community.

Reliable Sources (CNN): Can you believe your own eyes?

The New York Times: A.I. and Its Dangers Are Embedded In the Midterm Elections

The Atlantic: America Is About to See What Happens When Voters Turn to AI

Axios: The AI attack-ad nightmare is coming true

TechCrunch: Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.

NewsGuard’s Reality Check: Midterms Watch: OpenAI’s New Image Generator Produced Fake, Disparaging Images of Candidates on Request 80 Percent of the Time in NewsGuard Test

Documented: TikTok Lawyers Face Their AI Clones

Status: The Polling Pretenders

Public Notice: How Fox News whips viewers into a pre-midterm hysteria

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance: The Reoccuring Myth of Voter Fraud

Wired: They Believe 2020 Was Stolen. They Could Be in Charge of Elections in 2028.

We can see some pushback …