The first thing you’ll see if you search Google for “tank man” right now will not be the iconic picture of the unidentified Chinese man who stood in protest in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but an entirely fake, AI-generated selfie of that historical event.
While the AI-generated selfie doesn’t appear to be deliberate misinformation, it highlights an inherent problem with the current state of generative AI and the internet: It is exceedingly easy to use AI tools to generated endless images, text, and audio with little more than a click of a button, and as this content floods every online platform, we, and the platforms we use to surface information, still don’t have a good way to identify and differentiate it from human-made content, manually or automatically.
