NewsGuard, the purportedly impartial media rating service that has created a blacklist of disfavored news organizations, is ramping up efforts to prevent AI from spreading fake content that could influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election.that in the lead-up to the 2024 election, bad actors are already exploiting AI technology to generate and disseminate misinformation on a massive scale.
NewsGuard targets pro-Trump news outlets Despite presenting itself as a fake news watchdog, NewsGuard’s own founders have fueled false claims about major national news stories. At the height of the 2020 presidential election, NewsGuard co-founder Steve Brill stated on national television that he thought there was a “high likelihood” that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a “hoax perpetrated by the Russians.
NewsGuard maintains a browser extension that can be added to Edge, Chrome, and other web browsers. Once installed, NewsGuard “nutrition labels” appear next to links to news websites, with a green label signaling the website is trustworthy and a red label signaling the opposite. Among NewsGuard’s new initiatives is “fingerprinting” misinformation to help AI models detect and avoid sharing false claims. The group is also “red-teaming” AI systems, using the mindset of bad actors to ensure text, image, video, and audio generators cannot circumvent safeguards against misinformation.