With all booming technologies, there's both a good side and a bad side. It usually allows people to do more things faster and with better results, enhancing our way of life. However, there will always be someone who finds a way to use technology to do evil, and artificial intelligence is no exception.

With the rise of fake content and AI-generated misinformation, tech companies are ready to assure us they have everything under control. However, despite how much we've advanced with artificial intelligence in recent years, we're still not ready for the next wave of fake news from artificial intelligence.

Our current AI detection technologies provide late results

The damage will already be done

In a recent NBC interview with Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella (via Windows Central), he claimed that we're ready to fight off AI misinformation. To back this up, he cites technologies like deepfake detection, content IDs, and adding hidden watermarks to AI-generated content. In theory, this is a great tool to have in the war on misinformation; we can easily identify which media is real, and which has been created by a malicious agent.

The problem is that this media travels quickly. With all the ways that pictures and videos can travel the internet, it could be in the hands of tens of thousands of people long before it's picked up by someone with AI-checking technologies. It's great we have the technology to identify when these AI-generated pictures appear online, but if it has already spread and done damage, how much will it stem the tide?

Even worse, what if AI detection technology fails to identify AI-generated content? If people assume that a positive scan means that the media is definitely created by artificial intelligence, it may lead people to believe that a negative scan marks the media as undoubtedly real. And if misinformation peddlers manage to beat these detection systems, they can create a false negative and cause people to double down on believing that the fake media is real.

AI media is getting very convincing

You can't just look at the hands anymore

Remember when the Eiffel Tower burned down? A lot of people did, and it caused them to worry about how things are going over in Paris. The thing is, all the media surrounding the event was AI-generated, and the real Eiffel Tower was still standing pretty.

However, the content was so convincing that it caused people to believe that Paris was falling. There were very few AI anomalies in the image, and if you saw it as you were browsing Twitter, you'd think that it was a photograph of a real event.

Around the same time that the image was circulating online, people in New Hampshire were getting phone calls from Joe Biden. He told people that they shouldn't vote for him during the primaries, and to "save their votes for November," when the main election was being held. It was an odd thing for him to say, but with the power of AI voice imitation, two phone companies could make him say whatever they pleased and then had it read out their script to thousands of people through robo calls.

AI technology is getting to the point where it's not immediately obvious that the media created is fake. There are still holes in the armor, so a sharp-eyed or keen-eared observer can spot and identify a fake piece of media. However, as technology improves, it's going to get a lot harder for the average person to tell fiction from reality, creating a huge avenue for misinformation to spread.

AI tools are available for everyone to use

You don't need to be a genius to make misinformation

Perhaps this would all be manageable if AI misinformation could only be generated by technical experts. But as people do more amazing things with AI, the tools the public has available to them become more powerful, and AI PCs become more readily available, anyone can create misinformation if they please. This makes it hard to stem the flow, as people flood the internet with misleading and sometimes damning media to smear someone's reputation.

It's going to be a rough few years for identifying AI misinformation

Whether it's protecting someone from false accusations or keeping important political events free of lies, we are not ready for an AI misinformation wave. It's easy for anyone to create a believable AI-generated image to fool others, and our current technologies to identify and label content as artificially created are too slow to prevent the spread.

There's a chance we may just need to ride this out; much like how Photoshop made us skeptical about the images we see on the internet, we may need to become desensitized to the idea that the things we see and hear may have been created by a computer to fool us into taking a specific action.