• Ipsos Data Dive: Fake News in the Age of AI   


People across 29 countries are worrying that artificial intelligence is making it easier to trick people online into believing misinformation.

Ipsos;

Telling fact from fiction is harder than ever.

In the Age of AI, it’s pretty easy to get duped by a deepfake video or text written by ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence has made telling what’s real from what’s AI-generated difficult and many are feeling nervous about the nascent technology and how it will be used by humans.

AI aside, adults around the world are already pretty skeptical of a range of companies, professions and institutions these days.

“People do not trust politicians and the media that much to begin with,” says Shunichi Uchida, CEO of Ipsos Japan.

Indeed, the new edition of Ipsos’ Global Trustworthiness Monitor finds an abysmal 14%, on average across 31 countries, think politicians generally are trustworthy and just 25% think journalists are trustworthy.

Whether the increasing use of emerging tech will send trust levels even lower in the years ahead remains to be seen.

What we’ve seen already is when seismic events happen, from former U.S. President Donald Trump claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the Israel-Hamas war this month, misinformation and deepfakes spread like wildfire online.

Below, we look at how people across 29 countries are feeling about fake news, lying and misinformation in these tense times.

On the other hand, two in three are sure they can discern facts from fictions.
The majority in 27 of 29 countries say think they can sniff out the Real McCoy.
South Korea (45%) and Japan (34%) are the only countries where less than half agree with the statement: “I am confident that I can tell real news from fake news.” Uchida says being humble is “a major characteristic of Japanese culture” so that may account for the lack of confidence. Perhaps some of us should be eating a bit of humble pie as Uchida bluntly points out many “people do not have skills/ways of finding out what’s fake or not.”

You can access the complete data here.