Information Ecosystem Reengineering (IER) -- the technological reconditioning of information sources, services, and systems within a complex information ecosystem -- is a foundational challenge in the digital transformation of public sector services and smart governance platforms. From a semantic knowledge management perspective, IER becomes especially entangled due to the potentially infinite number of possibilities in its conceptualization, namely, as a result of manifoldness in the multi-level mix of perception, language and conceptual interlinkage implicit in all agents involved in such an effort. This paper proposes a novel approach -- Representation Disentanglement -- to disentangle these multiple layers of knowledge representation complexity hindering effective reengineering decision making. The approach is based on the theoretically grounded and implementationally robust ontology-driven conceptual modeling paradigm which has been widely adopted in systems analysis and (re)engineering. We argue that such a framework is essential to achieve explainability, traceability and semantic transparency in public sector knowledge representation and to support auditable decision workflows in governance ecosystems increasingly driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data-centric architectures.

A banal dystopia where manipulative content is so cheap to make and so easy to produce on a massive scale that it becomes ubiquitous: that's the political future digital experts are worried about in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms were vectors for misinformation as far-right activists, foreign influence campaigns and fake news sites worked to spread false information and sharpen divisions. Four years later, the 2020 election was overrun with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud that were amplified to millions, fueling an anti-democratic movement to overturn the election. Now, as the 2024 presidential election comes into view, experts warn that advances in AI have the potential to take the disinformation tactics of the past and breathe new life into them. AI-generated disinformation not only threatens to deceive audiences, but also erode an already embattled information ecosystem by flooding it with inaccuracies and deceptions, experts say. "Degrees of trust will go down, the job of journalists and others who are trying to disseminate actual information will become harder," said Ben Winters, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy research nonprofit.

Everybody seems to be enthralled with ChatGPT and the technology is indeed impressive. The chatbot is passing all kinds of graduate level exams, and educational institutions are rushing to devise policies to prevent students from cheating on assessments using the program. ChatGPT can even write scientific abstracts and research papers that fool scientists into thinking that they are real reports. Some users, however, have reported that the chatbot cited non-existent academic journal articles as source material. Amidst all this buzz, we recently conducted our own simple and non-iterative queries to test how the program fares with written texts, which are bread-and-butter products for the communications and PR industry. We noticed that prompts generated texts that included a few paragraphs at most and were short on e.g., persuasive arguments or supporting evidence.

In a world where seeing is increasingly no longer believing, experts are warning that society must take a multi-pronged approach to combat the potential harms of computer-generated media. As Bill Whitaker reports this week on 60 Minutes, artificial intelligence can manipulate faces and voices to make it look like someone said something they never said. The result is videos of things that never happened, called "deepfakes." Often, they look so real, people watching can't tell. Even Justin Bieber has been tricked by a series of deepfake videos on the social media video platform TikTok that appeared to be of Tom Cruise.

In a world where seeing is increasingly no longer believing, experts are warning that society must take a multi-pronged approach to combat the potential harms of computer-generated media. As Bill Whitaker reports this week on 60 Minutes, artificial intelligence can manipulate faces and voices to make it look like someone said something they never said. The result is videos of things that never happened, called "deepfakes." Often, they look so real, people watching can't tell. Just this month, Justin Bieber was tricked by a series of deepfake videos on the social media video platform TikTok that appeared to be of Tom Cruise.

Much has been written, and rightly so, about the potential that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to create and promote misinformation. But there is a less well-recognized but equally important application for AI in helping to detect misinformation and limit its spread. This dual role will be particularly important in geopolitics, which is closely tied to how governments shape and react to public opinion both within and beyond their borders. And it is important for another reason as well: While nation-state interest in information is certainly not new, the incorporation of AI into the information ecosystem is set to accelerate as machine learning and related technologies experience continued advances. The present article explores the intersection of AI and information integrity in the specific context of geopolitics.

There are a number of direct applications of AI relevant for national security purposes, both in the United States and elsewhere. Kevin Kelly notes that in the private sector "the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI."1 There is similarly a broad range of applications for AI in national security. Included below are some examples in cybersecurity, information security, economic and financial tools of statecraft, defense, intelligence, homeland security, diplomacy, and development. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of all possible uses of AI in these fields. Rather, these are merely intended as illustrative examples to help those in the national security community begin to think through some uses of this evolving technology.

"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.