Event Recap | Deepfakes, Disinformation, and the Battle for Digital Trust
Propaganda is ancient, but the tools available to those who deploy it are not. Across the history of influence campaigns, from wartime leaflets to coordinated social media operations, the psychological mechanisms have remained remarkably consistent, even as the technology has evolved to exploit them more efficiently. What generative AI has changed, more than anything, is the economics: it has made the production of deceptive content faster, cheaper, more linguistically fluent, and increasingly difficult to detect with the naked eye.
Recently, we hosted a conversation on how these dynamics are reshaping the information landscape, and what content provenance technology can do about it. Henry Ajder, CAI advisor and Founder of Latent Space Advisory, spoke with Renée DiResta, a leading expert on online manipulation and influence, in a wide-ranging discussion on the evolution of disinformation, the mechanics of how false narratives spread, and the role of infrastructure in rebuilding digital trust.
DiResta opened by reframing how people tend to think about AI and disinformation: the threat isn't primarily ideological manipulation, she argued, it's economic. AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing content at scale, which means spammers, scammers, and engagement farmers are the most prolific early adopters. She called this the "sloposphere," a sprawling ecosystem of AI-generated content churned out not to change minds but to generate clicks, followers, and platform revenue-sharing payments. She also described a four-part process through which false narratives can take hold.
On the role of content provenance technology in addressing digital deception, DiResta said that C2PA Content Credentials are genuinely valuable, but don’t resolve the deeper challenge of decontextualization or the social dynamics that lead people to share content that aligns with their identity regardless of its accuracy.
The conversation closed on the complementary social layer that technology alone can't replace: institutions learning to communicate in formats that algorithms reward, experts building algorithmic literacy alongside subject-matter expertise, and influential people taking accountability for the content they share.
Watch the full conversation below.