Opinion: Political deepfakes will hijack your brain – if you let them

AI has made it cheaper and easier than ever to use social media to promote a fake news site by manufacturing realistic fake people to comment on articles, said Filippo Menczer, a computer scientist and director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University. — Reuters

Realistic AI-generated images and voice recordings may be the newest threat to democracy, but they’re part of a longstanding family of deceptions. The way to fight so-called deepfakes isn’t to develop some rumour-busting form of AI or to train the public to spot fake images. A better tactic would be to encourage a few well-known critical thinking methods - refocusing our attention, reconsidering our sources, and questioning ourselves.

Some of those critical thinking tools fall under the category of “system 2” or slow thinking as described in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. AI is good at fooling the fast thinking “system 1” — the mode that often jumps to conclusions.