22. "Disinformation Is Becoming Unstoppable" In response to In response to 21
Underlying all of these tools is a technology with the potential to super-charge them: artificial intelligence. As AI is increasingly woven into the consumer-facing web, more and more content will be curated and presented by a machine. Should disinformation propagators harness AI, they will mar and adulterate our political culture and discourse with super-human power. Early versions of web-based AI technology already help create digital filter bubbles, escalate nonveracious content to the top of search results and power viral online hoaxes and noxious hate speech. To counter these trends, the companies try to feed the algorithms with instructions to spot and limit negative content. For example, services like YouTube continue to onboard more and more human reviewers to help identify, label and curate policy-violating content including extremist videos. But the scale of content is simply too large for comprehensive human review, and the vast majority of disinformation would not be taken down anyway because it is perfectly legal despite poisoning to our politics. We will not delete our way out of this problem.