Fox News correspondent Matt Finn has the latest on the impact of AI technology that some say could outpace humans on'Special Report.' Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the tech industry will face a "reckoning" over artificial intelligence, comparing the potential dangers of the technology to the risks associated with social media when the platforms were first rolled out years ago. "What happened with social media is we, including myself, just offered social media because we had a simple model of how humans would use social media. But, instead, look at how social media was used to interfere in elections, to cause harm. People have died over social media," Schmidt told ABC News on Sunday.

The team envisions RIO being used by both government and industry as well as beyond social media and in the realm of traditional media such as newspapers and television. Currently, they are working with West Point student Joseph Schlessinger, who is also a graduate student at MIT and a military fellow at Lincoln Laboratory, to understand how narratives spread across European media outlets. A new follow-on program is also underway to dive into the cognitive aspects of influence operations and how individual attitudes and behaviors are affected by disinformation.

The digital age, like the age of the printing press, has transformed our modes of social interaction -- our reading and writing habits and methods of communication and consumption. It is also disrupting long-standing institutions, threatening old hierarchies of knowledge and power. The benefits of this transformation are manifest. But the near universal availability of information also brings certain dangers. One is the prevalence of disinformation online, and the attendant challenge of discriminating between reliable and unreliable information. Both the need for reliable information and the dangers of disinformation have been thrown into sharp relief by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame are using artificial intelligence to develop an early warning system that will identify manipulated images, deepfake videos and disinformation online. The project is an effort to combat the rise of coordinated social media campaigns to incite violence, sew discord and threaten the integrity of democratic elections. The scalable, automated system uses content-based image retrieval and applies computer vision-based techniques to root out political memes from multiple social networks. "Memes are easy to create and even easier to share," said Tim Weninger, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Notre Dame. "When it comes to political memes, these can be used to help get out the vote, but they can also be used to spread inaccurate information and cause harm."