Masa Alimardani

So what's interesting is that we really are experiencing an unprecedented level of AI generated content by all the conflict actors.

What we have been seeing is a prevalence of typical war propaganda now being mobilized in deceptive ways.

by Israel by Islamic Republic of Iran to kind of promote their narratives we've of course seen a lot of different examples of you know the Iranian state and affiliated social media accounts of like state broadcasters show deceptive AI generated images of them attacking US bases in the region that were fake or

We've seen different types of content also come from Israeli sources showing certain things that don't exist, like AI generated images of military personnel and military equipment within schools.

The thing that has been most corrosive, however, has been the fact that not that we have this much content, which, of course, is a massive load on fact checkers.

The most corrosive aspect that we're seeing, it's the doubt that we have been seeing proliferate.

The fact that it's very hard for people to trust what they see and what they believe.

We have this kind of information environment in Iran, which is probably

this laboratory of some of the worst excesses that you can see of you know information pollution which is largely created by the fact that you have decades of information controls media controls by the regime and of course you have the Iranian opposition and you have the Iranian diaspora

And all of these different actors have really been contributing to different sorts of biases and perceptions.

And what we have really been seeing with the issue of doubt is evidence really being undermined.

The inability to really, for a lot of Iranians inside of the country, to even believe that the civilian casualties that are being documented by the state are real.

You have a regime that created this information environment that really

has accelerated this concept of the liar's dividend.

The liar's dividend is this term for this AI environment we are in where bad actors can use the accusation of AI to essentially deny the truth when it's inconvenient to them.

Well, we've always had war propaganda.

What this really does is really blur the ability to know what is real and what is not.

We have seen a massive acceleration in the capabilities of generative AI models.

And so the different types of deception we've been seeing has really been unprecedented.

My colleague Shirin and I actually did an analysis of