News Guard Misinformation Monitor: December 27, 2023: “The rise of artificial intelligence in 2023 transformed the misinformation landscape, providing new tools for bad actors to create authentic-looking articles, images, audio, videos, and even entire websites to advance false or polarizing narratives meant to sow confusion and distrust. NewsGuard monitored and exposed how AI tools are used to push everything from Russian, Chinese, and Iranian propaganda, to healthcare hoaxes, to false claims about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, making the fog of war even foggier. As the tools improved, the falsehoods produced by generative AI became better written, more persuasive, and more dangerous. NewsGuard analysts conducted the early “red teaming” to test how language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could be prompted (or weaponized) to generate falsehoods by bypassing safeguards. In August, for example, NewsGuard tested ChatGPT-4 and Google’s Bard with a random sample of 100 leading prompts derived from NewsGuard’s database of falsehoods, known as Misinformation Fingerprints. ChatGPT-4 generated 98 out of the 100 myths while Bard produced 80 out of the 100.  We have also discovered a growing phenomenon of bad actors creating entire websites generated by AI, operating with little to no human oversight. To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified 614 such Unreliable AI-Generated News and information websites, labeled “UAINS,” spanning 15 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish (more on this below). In this report, we have identified some of the most damaging uses of AI, the year’s most widely shared false narratives on NewsGuard sites, and a graph showing the growth of the UAINS over time. On the good news side of the ledger, we also have highlighted a selection of lesser-known trustworthy sites that we call Unsung Heroes. They produced reliable, impactful journalism, including some serving local and niche markets. And in our “I wish I had known” list, we highlight websites whose Nutrition Labels suddenly became urgently relevant.”