Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Trending Now Creator Playbook Mashable Selects Getting Technical with Mashable All Series The internet is trying to fool you. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. AI tools are boosting pink slime, and not just the TikTok kind. There is a 30 percent chance this article is fake. I am a real reporter.

Social media feeds are awash with an unprecedented flood of AI -driven disinformation ahead of November's US midterm elections, according to experts, who warn many posts are probably "slipping through the cracks". As tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their vote, social media companies have scaled back their efforts to protect voters from lies meant to manipulate elections. While the backlash against Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted social media giants to bolster their trust and safety operations, a counter-backlash from the right over fears of speech restrictions - which intensified after Elon Musk's takeover of X, formerly Twitter, and the election of Donald Trump in 2024 - has led to significant layoffs from relevant teams. Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to launch a disinformation campaign. And platforms are increasingly relying on AI, rather than human intervention, to respond.

If you image search on Google for'cultural heritage Australia', near the top of the results is a photograph of giant carved stone heads rising from a red desert. They look ancient and real. But the image is a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fabrication that never existed, and it is circulating the internet as though it is a real record of Australia's history. While GenAI, the technology behind chatbots and image generators, has the potential to broaden access to knowledge, it can also popularise false histories and strip Indigenous Knowledge of its context. It's something that can undermine both scientific expertise and Indigenous authority.

Amazon Says It's No Longer Using NDAs for Data Centers The company announced it will stop using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledges community backlash could lead to data center "moratoriums" across the country. Amazon has made a series of new public commitments to communities where it's building data centers, including making an official announcement that it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements in its arrangements with county officials. In a blog post published Friday, CEO Matt Garman detailed the steps the company says it's already taking around data centers. In addition to stopping the use of NDAs, Garman says $1 billion will be invested over the next five years in communities that house the company's data centers. The money will go toward free community college programs, workforce training, and energy efficiency upgrades for schools, homes, and community buildings.

In some cases, committee reports have cited submissions in which the majority of sources appear to be AI-generated - because they do not exist. In some cases, committee reports have cited submissions in which the majority of sources appear to be AI-generated - because they do not exist. 'Scary': how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia's parliament Mon 31 Aug 2026 11.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 31 Aug 2026 11.02 EDT Australia's government inquiry process is supposed to help parliament make better decisions, hearing from experts and constituents alike. But Guardian Australia can reveal that the system is being flooded with AI-generated material, which is inventing studies and attributing nonexistent research to real academics and authors. In some cases, committee reports have cited submissions in which the majority of sources appear to be AI-generated "hallucinations", when large language models (LLMs) invent content that looks real but doesn't actually exist.

Sudanese women gather for a hot meal in al-Rahmaniyah camp for displaced people, near the city of El-Obeid in the southern Kordofan region of Sudan on Tuesday. Geneva - Misinformation and hate speech are inciting harm to refugees, with artificial intelligence exacerbating the spread, the United Nations warned Tuesday, as it urged tech giants to help turn the tide. However, if handled the right way, AI could be put to good use in managing humanitarian crises, said UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. UNHCR is taking part in the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, putting across its point that the world's major displacement crises are often twinned with "information crises". The summit is an attempt by the wider U.N. to focus on using AI's potential to serve humanity by solving global challenges, and to look at the state of AI standards.

"You can make a living, you can have a life, and leave 55,000 emails unread with a big fuck off." Pete Holmes has Crashing "Silly Silly Fun Boy" I love this phone so much. The first thing I love about it is that it did not do well. And when I saw it, I couldn't wait to get it. People often think it's an Android. People often don't know what it is. I like having a phone nobody else has.

Plus: The US has allowed Anthropic to release Mythos 5 to "trusted" orgs. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. But external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important.

TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves. As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content - but there's a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests.

Misinformation detectors often rely on superficial cues (i.e., shortcuts) that correlate with misinformation in training data but fail to generalize to the diverse and evolving nature of real-world misinformation. This issue is exacerbated by large language models (LLMs), which can easily generate convincing misinformation using simple prompts. We introduce TruthOverTricks, a unified evaluation paradigm for measuring shortcut learning in misinformation detection. TruthOverTricks categorizes shortcut behaviors into intrinsic shortcut induction and extrinsic shortcut injection, and evaluates seven representative detectors across 14 popular benchmarks, along with two new factual misinformation datasets, NQ-Misinfo and Streaming-Misinfo. Empirical results reveal that existing detectors suffer severe performance degradation when exposed to both naturally occurring and adversarially crafted shortcuts. To address this, we propose the Shortcut Mitigation Framework (SMF), an LLM-augmented data augmentation framework that mitigates shortcut reliance through paraphrasing, factual summarization, and sentiment normalization. SMF consistently enhances robustness across 16 benchmarks, forcing models to rely on deeper semantic understanding rather than shortcut cues.