Mark Wahlberg straightens his tie and beams at the audience as he takes his seat on daytime talk show The View, ahead of his hotly anticipated interview. Immediately, he's unsettled by the host, Joy Behar. Her eyes seem shifty, suspicious, even predatory. There's a sense, almost, of the uncanny valley--her presence feels oddly inhuman. His instincts are right, of course, and he's soon forced to defend himself against a barrage of cruel insults playing on his deepest vulnerabilities.

Over the summer, a political action committee (PAC) supporting Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis uploaded a video of former president Donald Trump on YouTube in which he appeared to attack Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. It wasn't exactly real--though the text was taken from one of Trump's tweets, the voice used in the ad was AI-generated. The video was subsequently removed, but it has spurred questions about the role generative AI will play in the 2024 elections in the US and around the world. While platforms and politicians are focusing on deepfakes--AI-generated content that might depict a real person saying something they didn't or an entirely fake person--experts told WIRED there's a lot more at stake. Long before generative AI became widely available, people were making "cheapfakes" or "shallowfakes."

On the evening of Turkey's most significant elections of the past two decades, Can Semercioğlu went to bed early. For the past seven years, Semercioğlu has worked for Teyit, the largest independent fact-checking group in Turkey, but that Sunday, May 14, was surprisingly one of the quietest nights he remembers at the organization. Before the vote, opinion polls had suggested that incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was losing support due to devastating earthquakes in southeastern Turkey that killed nearly 60,000 people and a struggling economy. However, he still managed to secure just under 50 percent of the vote. His main opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who heads the Millet Alliance group of opposition parties, received around 45 percent, meaning the two will face off in a second round scheduled for May 28. "That night we didn't have much work to do because people were talking about the results," Semercioğlu says.

Cheapfake is a recently coined term that encompasses non-AI ("cheap") manipulations of multimedia content. Cheapfakes are known to be more prevalent than deepfakes. Cheapfake media can be created using editing software for image/video manipulations, or even without using any software, by simply altering the context of an image/video by sharing the media alongside misleading claims. This alteration of context is referred to as out-of-context (OOC) misuse of media. OOC media is much harder to detect than fake media, since the images and videos are not tampered. In this challenge, we focus on detecting OOC images, and more specifically the misuse of real photographs with conflicting image captions in news items. The aim of this challenge is to develop and benchmark models that can be used to detect whether given samples (news image and associated captions) are OOC, based on the recently compiled COSMOS dataset.

Karl Aberer, Ebrahim Bagheri, Marya Bazzi, Rumi Chunara, Ziv Epstein, Fabian Flöck, Adriana Iamnitchi, Diana Inkpen, Maurice Jakesch, Kyraki Kalimeri, Elena Kochkina, Ugur Kursuncu, Maria Liakata, Yelena Mejova, George Mohler, Daniela Paolotti, Jérémie Rappaz, Manon Revel, Horacio Saggion, Indira Sen, Panayiotis Smeros, Katrin Weller, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Christopher C. Yang, Fattane Zarrinkalam The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 2021 International Conference on Web and Social Media was held virtually from June 8-10, 2021. There were 8 workshops in the program: Data for the Wellbeing of Most Vulnerable, Emoji 2021: International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, Information Credibility and Alternative Realities in Troubled Democracies, International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats (CySoc 2021), International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2021): Special Edition on Information Operations on Social Media, Participatory Development of Quality Guidelines for Social Media Research: A Structured, Hands-on Design Workshop, Mediate 2021: News Media and Computational Journalism, Mining Actionable Insights from Social Networks: Special Edition on Healthcare Social Analytics.

On November 30, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao pinned an image to his Twitter profile. In it, a soldier stands on an Australian flag and grins maniacally as he holds a bloodied knife to a boy's throat. The boy, whose face is covered by a semi-transparent veil, carries a lamb. Alongside the image, Zhao tweeted, "Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, & call [sic] for holding them accountable."

From Ronald Reagan in 1984 to Bob Dole in 1996 and even Hillary Clinton in 2016, candidate health has become a common theme across recent U.S. presidential campaigns. The issue is poised to take on added significance this fall. No matter who wins, the U.S. is set to inaugurate its oldest president by a wide margin. The Trump campaign and its surrogates have seized on Democratic nominee Joe Biden's age and have been painting him as mentally unfit for the presidency. Videos of Biden falling asleep during an interview, misspeaking about the dangers of "Joe Biden's America" and appearing lost during a campaign event have bolstered the belief, particularly among Trump supporters, that Biden is in cognitive decline.

There are a number of plausible reasons why cheapfakes have outpaced deepfakes in the political domain. One is that, despite their crudeness, cheapfakes spread widely and can capture public debate and discourse. On pure cost-benefit grounds, fakers may opt to get more bang for their buck by using existing, proven techniques for editing and manipulating media. There are also technical reasons: a recent paper by one of us points out that sophisticated machine learning systems still require plenty of time for "training," which can slow the production of a faked video to the point where it is no longer relevant to the rapidly moving social media conversation.