Questioning everything you see online is a pretty standard reaction to online content. It would seem that we now have every reason to increase that vigilance.

The report highlights that, in most cases, synthetic media is created for entertainment and to improve services or improve quality of life, but the ever-increasing and advancement of technology creates more opportunities for misinformation.

There will be more artificial content

It’s worth noting that 90 percent is a pretty impressive figure. Of course, people have already gotten used to the existence of bots on the Internet, and neural networks that convert text into images are gaining popularity every day. However, we don’t always assume by default that almost everything we communicate digitally can be fake.

Every day people rely on their own perception to guide them and tell them what is real and what is not. Audio and visual recordings of events are generally considered accurate. But what if this media could be artificially created, adapted to show events that never happened, to distort events, or to distort reality?
– Says the Europol report.

Nobody knows what to do

The report pays close attention to the disinformation spread, especially with the help of deep fake technologies (so-called deep fakes). But the 90 percent figure raises a number of important questions that no one can answer.

There are already disputes about the authorship of the images created by such neural networks. GPT-3, Dall-E or Journey Break. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because the big question is what to do when synthetic content fills the web.

Currently, it is still possible to distinguish synthetic images from the work of digital artists, but it will become increasingly difficult and one day it will probably be very difficult to distinguish such images from reality. This opens up an extremely wide scope for the creation of fakes, which will certainly be used for fraud, deception and personal gain.

However, tools to detect synthetic content are bound to emerge, and Instagram will see something like the “This content was created thanks to a neural network” tag, as in warnings about COVID-19. We should be as careful as possible with everything we see on the Internet.