Renee Buhr, political science and international studies professor at the University of St. Thomas College of Arts and Sciences, and Manjeet Rege, software engineering and data science professor at the School of Engineering, recently joined PBS’ “Almanac” to discuss misinformation, artificial intelligence and election interference.
From the interview:
Host: how sophisticated are these operations?
Buhr: So, they’re extremely sophisticated. On one hand, it’s not all that new; what Russian intelligence agencies are doing right now is what they have been doing for decades. Looking back to the KGB, the psychological strategies they’re using to manipulate people and spread disinformation are really the same things they’ve been doing for decades.
Host: Can the platforms themselves filter this stuff out?
Rege: Well, they can, but it depends on what kind of video it is. So, you have fake videos that are the “deepfakes,” and then there are “cheapfakes.” The cheapfakes may not use much AI, so a platform might try to monitor AI usage. But if you’ve hired an actor to enact, let’s say, a particular incident that never happened, these platforms are trying to detect AI – but if no AI was used, that doesn’t mean the video isn’t fake.
