Grok also falsely claimed that a Utah-based registered Democrat named Michael Mallinson had been identified as the shooter, wrongly attributing the information to major news outlets such as CNN and the New York Times.<\/p>\n
Mallinson, in reality a 77-year-old retired Canadian banker living in Toronto, said he was \u201cshocked\u201d by thousands of social media posts that labelled him the culprit.<\/p>\n
Breaking news events often spark a frantic search for new information on social media, frequently leading to false conclusions that chatbots then regurgitate, contributing to further online chaos.<\/p>\n
The tide of misinformation comes after a volatile environment in the United States following Kirk\u2019s assassination, with many right-wing influencers from Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again (Maga) political base calling for violence and \u201cretribution\u201d against the left.<\/p>\n
The motives of the gunman involved in the shooting \u2013 who remains at large \u2013 are unknown.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, some conspiracy theorists have baselessly claimed that the video showing Kirk being shot was AI-generated, asserting that the entire incident was staged.<\/p>\n
The assertion underscores how the rise of cheap and widely available AI tools has given misinformation peddlers a handy incentive to cast doubt about the authenticity of real content \u2013 a tactic researchers have dubbed as the \u201cliar\u2019s dividend\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have analysed several of the videos [of Kirk\u2019s shooting] circulating online and find no evidence of manipulation or tampering,\u201d said Hany Farid, the co-founder of GetReal Security and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Farid also reported seeing some AI-generated videos.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an example of how fake content can muddy the waters and in turn cast doubt on legitimate content,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The falsehoods underline how facts are increasingly under assault in a misinformation-filled internet landscape, an issue exacerbated by public distrust of institutions and traditional media.<\/p>\n
It has exposed an urgent need for stronger AI detection tools, experts say, as major tech platforms have largely weakened safeguards by reducing investment in human fact-checking.<\/p>\n
Researchers say chatbots have previously made errors verifying information related to other crises such as the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East, the recent India-Pakistan conflict, and anti-immigration protests in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
A recent audit by NewsGuard found that 10 leading AI chatbots repeated false information on controversial news topics at nearly double the rate compared to one year ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cA key factor behind the increased fail rate is the growing propensity for chatbots to answer all inquiries, as opposed to refusing to answer certain prompts,\u201d NewsGuard said in a report last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Large Language Models (LLMs) now pull from real-time web searches \u2013 sometimes deliberately seeded by vast networks of malign actors.\u201d<\/p>\n
-Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grok also falsely claimed that a Utah-based registered Democrat named Michael Mallinson had been identified as the shooter,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[19053,74,365,363,364,19050,12413,15308,4035,19061,19057,19056,19048,16843,2079,19060,14724,305,19051,19058,18153,1073,19052,111,139,69,1642,2847,19055,19059,18938,1072,9939,19049,16349,145,19054,9938,7245,16742,102],"class_list":["post-17220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-activist","tag-after","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-assassination","tag-chaos","tag-charlie","tag-chatbots","tag-confusion","tag-contradictory","tag-encounter","tag-factchecks","tag-false","tag-fire","tag-fuelling","tag-further","tag-have","tag-hose","tag-inaccurate","tag-kirk","tag-media","tag-misinformation","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-online","tag-only","tag-reliable","tag-responses","tag-rightwing","tag-social","tag-states","tag-stir","tag-surrounding","tag-technology","tag-turned","tag-united","tag-updates","tag-users","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}