Join the Cyber Policy Center on February 4 from 1PM–2PM Pacific for AI and Social Media Manipulation: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a seminar with Filippo Menczer, moderated by Jeff Hancock Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.

Disinformation can be very harmful. AI provides us with tools to mitigate these harms, such as methods to detect inauthentic accounts and coordinated information operations. Large language models (LLMs) can also help rate the reliability of information sources and aid in fact-checking tasks. However, attempts to scale up these AI-supported interventions must account for unintended consequences when people interact with AI. In some cases, fact checking information generated by an LLM can actually decrease news discernment. In the hands of bad actors, AI can become a dangerous weapon. Aside from much-discussed deepfakes, generative AI can be used to easily and cheaply create fake but credible profiles and content at scale. These capabilities enable the infiltration and manipulation of vulnerable online communities. Given the near-impossibility of detecting AI-generated content, research is needed to develop new ways of challenging the provenance of content before wide exposure through distribution channels like social media and search engines.

About the Speaker

Filippo Menczer is the Luddy distinguished professor of informatics and computer science and the director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests span Web and data science, computational social science, science of science, and modeling of complex information networks. Dr. Menczer was named a Fellow of the ACM for his research on the vulnerability of social media networks to disinformation and manipulation.