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Verified By BOOM 79

Verified By BOOM 79

2023 Review: Scams, AI, Deepfakes

December 29, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Browser View | December 30, 2023 | Subscribe

Hello,

The year 2023 has kept fact-checkers across the world extremely busy with a plethora of misinformation being disseminated using AI, Deepfakes et al.

As many predict the next year is the year of AI, we, at BOOM, ask you to pledge: Stop. Verify. Share.

Here’s the entire BOOM team wishing you a very happy and misinformation-less New Year!

Pallywood, AI, Graphic Violence Breed Fake News On Israel-Palestine: BOOM Study

🔖 The current spate of violence between Israel and Palestine precipitated one of the biggest fake news cycles in recent times, often marked by disturbing images and videos of graphic violence.

BOOM fact-checked 100 false claims between 7 October- 22 December 2023. Here are some of the key highlights of the study carried out by Archis Chowdhury & Nidhi Jacob.

Misinformation on both sides: While false/misleading claims supporting Israel were dominant accounting for 44%, those supporting Palestine followed closely at 38%.
Verified handles lead the charge: 64% of all the claims involved at least one verified account on X (formerly Twitter). Also, 13% of these claims were shared by official handles linked to a government or authority.

Video games, AI & Deepfake: 8% of the claims were found to falsely share video game footage (mostly from combat simulators) as real. Furthermore, 4% of the claims were made using images that were entirely fabricated through artificial intelligence, while 2% of the claims were made using deepfakes (videos edited using artificial intelligence).

Scams To Sextortion: A Look At The Cybercrimes Of 2023

🔖 From cunning Aadhaar-related scams to the insidious world of sextortion scams, the realm of cybercrime has witnessed a surge in creativity and complexity, posing the law enforcement with challenges that necessitate the adaptation to emerging technologies to stay one step ahead of evolving scams in the future.

Decode covered a plethora of cybercrimes happening around the country. Hera Rizwan lists the top scams we witnessed in 2023.

BOOM Rewind: Important Supreme Court Judgements In 2023

🔖 This year proved remarkable for the Supreme Court for the high number of judgments given by Constitution Benches (benches of five judges and seven judges).

Here are some data points:

The Supreme Court Constitution Bench gave 18 judgments (five-judge benches: 17, seven-judge bench: one).
14 judges were appointed while nine retired.
The top court made a dent in the backlog of its cases by disposing of 52,191 cases against the registration of 49,191 cases.

BOOM’s Ritika Jain looks at important judgements from 2023.

🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 The year 2023 provided an unsettling preview of how generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be misused to commit fraud, create non-consensual imagery and generate misinformation, in India.

Key highlights:

While the buzz around deepfakes has existed since 2017, this year Indian fact-checkers saw synthetic content tailored to local audiences and AI voice clones in Hindi—a phenomenon not seen before.
AI images generators have got better & better.
Generative AI’s most troubling use case has been its role in generating non-consensual imagery in the form of deepfake pornography.

Read the detailed report by Anmol Alphonso.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: AI will democratize disinformation by Nieman Lab

Each year, Nieman Lab publishes predictions made by people in the journalism space about what they think is coming next year. One such prediction for 2024 is how in the coming year “AI will, unfortunately, democratize misinformation — empowering anyone with a keyboard to create fake news cheaply and at scale.”

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Verified By Boom is written by Divya Chandra, edited by Adrija Bose

and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

If you have suggestions about this newsletter or want us to conduct workshops on specific topics, drop us a line at 👉 [email protected] and we will get back to you in a jiffy. Thanks for reading. See you next week.👋

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