Politicians are also concerned . At a hearing in late July, senators grilledexperts about the likelihood of elections being manipulated. “I, for one, do not want the working people in this country and the children of this country to be used as guinea pigs for generativeprinciples that includes a licensing regime for advanced models.
That should not be surprising: most users seem impermeable to genuine news on social media, too. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, allowed researchers to experiment with the information served up to a group of American users in the run-up to the presidential election of 2020. Some were shown fewer items that fitted their pre-existing beliefs, and more that challenged them.
Indeed, social media may not be shaping American political life as much as is commonly assumed. It cannot explain heightened polarisation and diminished trust in institutions, since both trends are much older than X, Facebook and Instagram. A study published in 2017 by Mr Gentzkow, Levi Boxell and Jesse Shapiro found that political polarisation had increased most rapidly among the elderly, despite the fact that they used social media less than younger voters.
Researchers are also busy devising technology to determine which recordings or films are real, including watermarking synthetically generated text and images. Elizabeth Seger of the Centre for the Governance of, a British think-tank, talks of a “digital signature” that can be used to verify the original source of an image. A consortium calledis trying to create a standard that would prove that media are authentically generated.