Abu Dhabi

In a session held in the UAE Pavilion at the World Economic Forum WEF 2024, Sir Martin Sorrell, a notable media and marketing figure, and David Haigh, Chairman and CEO of Brand Finance, engaged in an exclusive fireside chat discussing the urgent and critical issue of “Misinformation and Disinformation,” an obstacle highlighted by the WEF as the most significant short-term risk.

The one-to-one fireside chat, focused on the global issue of misinformation. The conversation explored the soft power landscape, with a special emphasis on the Media Communications sector—an integral pillar in the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index.

Sir Martin Sorrell and David Haigh addressed the main challenges facing traditional media, including the dynamic information landscape of today which presents unprecedented challenges for traditional media giants. Sorrell and Haigh unraveled the hurdles faced by the industry titans as they strive to maintain relevance and credibility.

During the discussing, participants highlighted the key role of the Digital and Social Media, where they discussed its risks, shedding light on the complexities of navigating the digital landscape in an era of rapid technological advancement. The world of digital and social media is ever-evolving, offering powerful communication tools that come with inherent risks. The fireside chat will explore these risks. They emphasized that the world of digital and social media is ever-evolving, offering powerful communication tools that come with inherent risks.

Also, the fireside chat highlighted the impact of misinformation and its profound effects on societies and global affairs, dissecting the implications of distorted information on public opinion, governance, and international relations.

Discussion has been wrapped up with a thoughtful exploration of actionable solutions, mitigating the risks posed by misinformation and disinformation. The collaboration between Sir Martin Sorrell and David Haigh underscores the importance of uniting industry leaders to address global challenges. The exclusive fireside provided valuable perspectives on the complexities of the media landscape and offered tangible solutions for a world grappling with misinformation.

Published under an International Cooperation Protocol with Middle East Business

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The post Misinformation leaves profound effects on societies and global affairs first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By ABDULLAH TIJANI

Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images have sparked controversy in recent years, and the decision of Midjourney, a popular AI tool, to discontinue its free trials has prompted discussions among journalists about who gets to control AI use.

“Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse, we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed,” said David Holz, Midjourney’s founder, in March.

Although Holz was not specific about what abuse had prompted the decision, he announced the change a few days after a series of false images, including one of former U.S. President Donald Trump being arrested and another of Pope Francis wearing a fashionable jacket, went viral online.

The decision to cancel free access to Midjourney highlights how AI-generated images have contributed to the spread of mis- and disinformation online, and the challenges journalists face with new AI technologies. Here’s what journalists should know:

Journalists’ use of AI generating tools

Journalists use AI-generated images to create illustrations and visualizations that can enhance their stories and engage their audiences. For example, a journalist can use Midjourney to create an image of a character based on a description from a book review, or to generate a landscape of a hypothetical scenario (such as an extrasolar planet) based on a scientific report.

“For the most part, uses of AI generated images for journalism that I’ve seen are more of a value add, used in cases where images are nice to have and would be expensive to create, but are not a required core piece of the work,” said Brandon Roberts, a U.S.-based independent data journalist.

However, while journalists largely use AI-generated images responsibly, other uses have been more controversial. For example, Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a collective of investigative journalists, used Midjourney to create images of politicians to tell hypothetical but fictional stories.

On March 20, Higgins tweeted a series of pictures he made using Midjourney. The pictures depicted Trump resisting arrest with this caption: “Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest.” Four days earlier, he had also tweeted a picture of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, being charged in court. The images quickly went viral, and despite stating his pictures were fictional and AI-generated, Midjourney responded by locking Higgins out of the platform’s Discord server.

“The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes,” said Higgins in an email to the Associated Press.

Impacts of AI image generators on journalism

Midjourney’s decision to discontinue its free trial is the latest in the debate about how to ethically use AI in journalism, which have accelerated with the popularization of another AI tool, Chat GPT. While some journalists see Midjourney as a useful tool, others see a potential threat, arguing that Midjourney and other AI image generators like DALL-E complicate the ability for fact-checkers to verify the authenticity and accuracy of images.

This is especially relevant as visual content resonates more with audiences, wrote Marilín Gonzalo, a technology columnist at Newtral, a Spanish fact-checking organization, in response to the false images of Pope Francis and Trump. “You can talk to a person for an hour and give him 20 arguments for one thing, but if you show him an image that makes sense to him, it is going to be very difficult to convince him that’s not true,” said Gonzalo.

However, although human eyes can easily be fooled, AI-generated images can be detected through tools, argued Gonzalo.

“If [technology] is used to create them, it can also be used to detect them,” she wrote.

Challenges to fact-checking with the emergence of new technologies are not new, said Felix Simon, a journalist and researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “The relationship between image and truth has always been unstable,” he said. “One could say that what we see with generative AI is just a continuation of that. Many people will get used to it.”

Effects of the paywall

Considering that Midjourney’s paid version is still available, Charlie Backett, a professor and AI journalism expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes the decision to discontinue the free trial won’t have as large of an impact as some journalists believe.

“I don’t think that [Midjourney’s decision] will have much impact on responsible journalists who want to experiment. It may make it too expensive for some people but if a product is free, then you are the product, as they say,” said Beckett.

However, with the decision to end the free trial, questions remain as to the usefulness of Midjourney for journalists in the future. When compared with other AI-generated image tools like OpenAI’s DALL–E, whose policies bar users from creating certain violent images or images of real political figures, experts consider Midjourney more permissive. But the decision to discontinue Midjourney’s free version proves that all is changing.

In an interview with The Verge, Holz said Midjourney has already banned some words “related to topics in different countries based on complaints from users in those countries.” Because of the false images of Trump, the term “arrested” has been added to the list of restricted words that can no longer be used to generate content on the platform.

Kunle Adebajo, an investigations editor at HumanAngle, believes it is better that tools like Midjourney, with their potential to spread misinformation, are not free for everyone. “You should have to pay to use them because then you will be more careful knowing that you are spending your money, and you will be more careful with the thing you use it for,” he said.

“But of course, people who are deliberate about spreading misinformation would not mind also spending some money to access this service. So Midjourney still has to put in place certain frameworks to ensure that they bring that possibility to the barest minimum.”

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Courtesy: IJNET (Posted on May 22, 2023)  

The post How AI-generated images are complicating efforts to combat disinformation first appeared on Sindh Courier.

BY AMARAH ENNIS

It is just as important to identify the actors who perpetuate disinformation as it is the false facts themselves: if a journalist is able to target the source of false information, they can expose and neutralize it.

During an ICFJ Disarming Disinformation masterclass, held in partnership with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, award-winning data journalist and director of Columbia University’s Master of Science Data Journalism Program, Giannina Segnini, discussed these “digital mercenaries” and how to stop them.

Digital mercenaries

Digital mercenaries tend to present themselves erratically online, said Segnini. “I call them digital mercenaries because one day they sell trousers; the next day they support a left wing candidate; the next day, a right wing candidate,” she said. “Some are ideologically consistent, but in general it is a [nonaligned] industry made of data scientists and publicists.”

Segnini has also dubbed digital mercenaries “children of Cambridge Analytica,” referring to the consulting firm that harvested the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent for political advertising. They aren’t just individuals, she cautioned: “These could be intelligence groups, state intelligence operators, transnational and very powerful industries, [as well as] individual donors and religious groups,” said Segnini. “They use data to target people who may be susceptible to disinformation.”

Both the 2016 Trump campaign and the U.K.’s Vote Leave campaign on Brexit were headed by Cambridge Analytica. Today, its “children” are trying to imitate the success of those campaigns in countries across Africa and Latin America.

Upside down campaigns

Digital mercenaries often lead covert efforts beneath the surface of political campaigns. “These are campaigns that operate in a number of countries,” said Segnini. “Normally, we never learn who is behind them because they’re parallel worlds.”

On the visible side, candidates use campaign funds to pay their staff, conduct polls, and fund other above board actions. Transnational organizations hoping to further their own agendas operate anonymously underneath this credible facade. They spend money on data analysis and prediction, content production across a host of platforms, and on targeting specific voter groups online.

The actions of the hidden campaign aid those of the visible campaign and vice versa. “There’s this explosion of well-designed campaigns using artificial intelligence to orient certain messages to a certain location,” said Segnini.

Investigative cycle

Segnini outlined five interchangeable steps to help journalists find information about digital mercenaries hiding on social media platforms and elsewhere online:

Check reports by official social media sources. Segnini highlighted Google’s Threat Analysis Group and Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report.

Search public documents. For research in the U.S., Segnini recommended using the FARA Index, a U.S. government database for tracking agents of foreign parties.

Research individuals on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

Research companies by visiting their websites. If you’re unable to access a website or page, or want to see what information used to be on the site, try using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Follow the money. This doesn’t always mean bank account transactions, Segnini noted. “In [Latin America], there are massive campaigns of disinformation directed by the governments, and it’s more difficult because it’s the government itself that does the infrastructure, but contracts have to be paid,” she said. “You have to follow assets in a coherent way to get a better idea of the ecosystem. What budgetary allocation was used? By who? What assets are being liquidated there?”

Once a journalist uncovers the names of companies and people of interest, they can begin to look for more specific details. Be practical when searching for more information on these businesses and think logically about next steps, Segnini urged.

“If we have the names, we [can] look at local registrations, business registrations… think in real life terms of all of the operations that have to be done,” she said. “If there’s a remodeling of a building, for example — if you have an address, you can find it in the Ministry of Public Buildings or the Buildings Registry, or whatever the government entity is. There can be inspections for remodeling; somebody signed that. You can be creative in following the names in all of the publicly available databases.”

Information about where corporations or individual actors are operating may also exist in Google Maps and Tweetdeck. “You can find where these companies are registered online corporations,” said Segnini.

Want to get started tracking digital mercenaries? Here are a few more resources to check out.

NINA, a new Spanish-language database developed by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, that compiles connections between companies and individual contractors in Latin America. Registration for the site is free.

Hoaxy is a tool by Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) that can be used to track how information spreads on Twitter.

Botometer is another tool by OSoMe that can estimate how likely it is that a certain Twitter account is a bot.

The RAND Corporation has a comprehensive database of tools for fighting disinformation as part of their Countering Truth Decay Initiative.

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Courtesy: IJNET (Posted on Dec 30, 2022 in COMBATING MIS- AND DISINFORMATION)

The post How to track digital mercenaries behind disinformation first appeared on Sindh Courier.