A report by National Taiwan University (NTU) showed that many Taiwanese trust generative artificial intelligence (AI) more than human-created data in a worrisome display of susceptibility to fake news.
More than 90 percent of Taiwanese reported exposure to disinformation, mostly coming from scammers, NTU professor Hung Chen-ling (洪貞玲) told a news conference on Friday, citing an ongoing long-term study that began in 2022.
Fact-checking has gained traction, with more than 70 percent of Taiwanese reported making use of fact-checking platforms, while the same percentage of Taiwanese expressed trust in their credibility, she said.
Photo: REUTERS
Between 80 percent and 90 percent of Taiwanese support anti-disinformation laws that target social media platforms, according to the study, suggesting widespread frustration over fraudsters, Hung said.
In response to the popularity of generative AI, the survey this year included AI-related questions for the first time, she said.
Seventy percent of respondents have consumed content generated by AI, and the public appeared mostly unaware of AI’s potential for falsifying and misreporting data, she said.
A majority of respondents who reported frequent generative AI use said they have more trust in the objectivity and accuracy of machine-generated information, she said.
Although 80 percent of respondents reported spotting erroneous information in AI-generated content, a majority of those who frequently used the technology said they have more trust in machine-generated data than that of humans, Hung said.
Close to 10 percent of Taiwanese believed they could always tell AI-generated disinformation compared with 30 percent who believed they usually could and 40 percent who believed they could only sometimes, she said.
About 15 percent of study respondents said they rarely identified AI-created fake news, and a small percentage reported that they never detected falsehoods in media generated by the technology, she said.
Careless use of generative AI would likely facilitate the dissemination of fake news and amplify existing social prejudices, she said.
Public Television Service chairman Hu Yuan-hui (胡元輝), who formerly headed the Taiwan FactCheck Center, said the study was an alarming sign of media illiteracy.
People with unfounded confidence in their ability to distinguish truths from falsehoods are more likely to fall prey to a hallucinating AI, he said, referring to the tendency of malfunctioning algorithms to make up information.
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