404 Media – and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem – “As an endless stream of entirely wrong and sometimes dangerous AI-generated answers from Google are going viral on social media, new research from Google researchers and several fact checking organizations have found that most image-based disinformation is now AI-generated, but the way researchers collected their data suggests that the problem is even worse than they claim. The paper, first spotted by the Faked Up newsletter, measures the rise of AI-generated image-based disinformation by looking at what fact checkers at Snopes, Politifact, and other sites have claimed were image-based disinformation. Overall, the study looks at a total of 135,838 fact checks which date back to 1995, but the majority of the claims were created after 2016 and the introduction of ClaimReview, a tagging system that allows fact checkers and publishers to flag disinformation for platforms like Google, Facebook, Bing, and others. The most telling chart in the study shows the “prevalence of content manipulation types as a function of overall content manipulations.” In other words, it shows the different types of image-based disinformation and how common they are over time…”