The new AI tools spreading fake news in politics and business

When Camille François, a longstanding expert on disinformation, sent an email to her team late last year, many were perplexed. Her message began by raising some seemingly valid concerns: that online disinformation -- the deliberate spreading of false narratives typically designed to sow mayhem -- "could get out of control and become a huge threat to democratic norms". But the text from the chief innovation officer at social media intelligence group Graphika soon became rather more wacky. Disinformation, it read, is the "grey goo of the internet", a reference to a nightmarish, end-of-the world scenario in molecular nanotechnology. The solution the email proposed was to make a "holographic holographic hologram". The bizarre email was not actually written by François, but by computer code; she had created the message -- from her basement -- using text-generating artificial intelligence technology.