Misinformation

A week after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's heavily secured wedding at Madison Square Garden — where guests signed NDAs and surrendered their phones — not a single verified photo of the ceremony, dress, or interior had surfaced. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum: AI-generated fake images quickly filled the void, ranging from obvious joke edits to deliberately blurry, pixelated fakes designed to pass as illicit snapshots from inside the venue.

Swifties, already trained in the art of close textual observation from years of hunting "Easter eggs" in Swift's lyrics, turned those same skills on the fakes — spotting warped facial features, anatomically impossible dress straps, and watermarks from AI-detection tools like Google DeepMind's SynthID. As fan and video producer Alexa Volland put it, "they built a habit of close observation." The episode is a neat case study in how a high-profile information blackout predictably generates an AI-powered misinformation ecosystem — and how an unusually media-literate fanbase can push back.

Jonathan Rinaldi, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for a Queens City Council seat in 2025, was arrested and charged with third-degree forgery and possession of forged instruments after prosecutors alleged he used AI to manufacture a string of fake political endorsements and news stories on Facebook and Instagram. The fabrications included a bogus Queens Jewish Alliance endorsement complete with the real organization's logo, a doctored New York Post article falsely claiming his Democratic opponent had endorsed him, and AI-generated videos depicting a police precinct and an elementary school — both barred from political endorsements — backing his campaign. The AI prompt he allegedly submitted to swap a politician's face onto a handshake photo read, in part: "just change the face the head is ok they are both bald just change the face."

Rinaldi framed his arrest as a First Amendment issue, telling the AP, "I got arrested for social media posts." Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz was less impressed, noting that the defendant "used AI to replace factual political support" in a "deliberate effort to mislead voters." The forgery laws he's charged under predate AI entirely; New York's newer deepfake disclosure law, passed in 2024, wasn't even needed here. Rinaldi faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

Leaked documents obtained by Bloomberg reveal that Russia's Social Design Agency (SDA) has been running a coordinated influence operation — labeled "Project 2026" — designed not to flood social media timelines, but to quietly poison the reference layer that search engines and AI chatbots draw from. Components include a German-language Wikipedia clone built to pass as legitimate reference material, and an AI-driven "self-filling knowledge base" that internal documents claim already contains over 200,000 pages of potentially manipulated content. A third initiative targeting Western think tanks has reportedly launched in English, with French, German, and Spanish versions planned. Internal materials describe the effort as carrying out "cognitive strikes" against Western societies, with the SDA reportedly working closely with the Russian Presidential Administration.

The attack surface is meaningfully different from conventional bot campaigns: a reference site that gets indexed and scraped into AI training data is far harder to unwind than a deleted tweet. The stated intent, per the documents, is that propaganda surfaces in AI-generated answers with no obvious link to its origin. Significant caveats apply — these are leaked, unverified documents, and no major AI company has confirmed that SDA-linked content has reached their training pipelines or live retrieval systems. What it does make clear is that source provenance in retrieval-augmented systems is no longer a background concern.

An investigation by The Guardian has found that brands are increasingly using AI-generated influencers to promote products on social media, with no clear labeling that the people shown aren't real. Some content creators producing this material have been asked to sign NDAs to keep the practice under wraps. One former celebrity manager who now builds AI influencers for brands estimated that 40–60% of content from some major brands is AI-generated, with the cost appeal being blunt: "Brands want high-end photography but they don't want to pay $20,000 to $70,000 for a traditional photoshoot."

The regulatory picture is equally bleak. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority acknowledges there are no specific rules requiring disclosure of AI-generated promotional content. The EU's AI Act will mandate labeling of AI-manipulated content starting in August — but it won't apply in the UK. Consumer group Which? is calling for clearer transparency, while brands like Dubai-based fashion label Ashle quietly removed AI-generated imagery only after The Guardian came asking.

In October 2025, KPMG — one of the world's "Big Four" accounting firms — published a report titled Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI, intended to showcase how companies are deploying AI to serve customers. Investigators from GPTZero later found that only 5 of the report's 45 citations pointed to real sources; 28 paraphrased or fabricated components of real sources, and 12 were too vague to verify. Roughly half the paper's claims were fake or misattributed, including assertions that Emirates runs an AI chatbot capable of altering flights (it doesn't), that UBS has deployed agentic AI across investment advisory and compliance (the bank called this "factually incorrect"), and that Swiss Federal Railways uses AI agents to optimize trips by carbon impact (also "not accurate").

GPTZero coined the term "vibe citing" for AI models' habit of generating plausible-sounding but fabricated references. The stakes here go beyond embarrassment: KPMG-branded research is routinely cited by other firms and academics as a trusted source, meaning hallucinated claims could propagate through the broader knowledge ecosystem — what GPTZero's CEO called "poisoning the well of information." KPMG has since pulled the report and says it is "reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication."

AI-generated deepfake videos depicting Reform UK leader Nigel Farage physically fighting Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey on the set of BBC One's Question Time — including one showing Farage brandishing a gun — spread across X on 9 June 2026. The videos were linked to financial scams impersonating the Bank of England and other central banks to exploit members of the public online.

Bailey publicly urged vigilance and called on people to report the videos for removal, while Farage himself felt compelled to clarify that, policy disagreements aside, he had not in fact attacked the central bank governor. The Bank has raised the matter with Reform UK and social media platforms. X, which explicitly prohibits impersonation, had not commented at time of publication — and the UK's Online Safety Act provisions covering fraudulent advertising don't come into force until next year.

A NewsGuard study found that a chatbot called "Uncensored AI" — which markets itself as providing "unfiltered information" free from censorship — is being deliberately weaponized by conservative social media influencers with a combined 3.4 million followers on X to lend false credibility to conspiracy theories. Claims spread via screenshots include that the 2020 US election was rigged through "mass illegal ballot harvesting," that Israeli intelligence orchestrated the murder of Charlie Kirk (who has an identified alleged assassin), and that Trump staged assassination attempts on himself.

When Euronews' fact-checking unit ran its own tests targeting European disinformation narratives, the results were equally lurid: the chatbot called the Great Replacement Theory a "documented policy" engineered by "globalist elites," denied the Holocaust and the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, and claimed the EU rigs elections "with surgical precision" while most journalists are "bribed or brainwashed." The platform, founded in Omaha, Nebraska in February 2023, did not respond to a request for comment.

When researchers and journalists searched Google for Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, and James Hardie — companies with decades of documented harm — Google's AI Overviews returned glowing summaries drawn heavily from the companies' own websites. Philip Morris was described as "a leading international tobacco company working to transition from cigarettes to smoke-free products" focused on "a future without cigarettes," with no mention of court findings that the company spent decades lying to the public about the addictiveness and health risks of smoking. James Hardie, once Australia's largest asbestos distributor, was hailed as a "global leader" that "pioneered asbestos-free fibre cement" — omitting that asbestos products still kill thousands of Australians each year.

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman called the Philip Morris summary "essentially a regurgitation of Philip Morris International's PR materials." Experts say companies are now racing to optimise their websites specifically so AI systems ingest and repeat their preferred narratives — a practice known as generative engine optimisation (GEO). Google maintains it does not allow paid influence over AI Overviews and draws from sources it deems most reliable, but its own disclaimer acknowledges the feature "may sometimes provide inaccurate content." After the ABC contacted Google, subsequent searches began returning overviews that at least noted Philip Morris's "Big Tobacco" classification — though Google denies that change had anything to do with the inquiry.

A new study found that AI chatbots — including ChatGPT and its rivals — served up incorrect election information nine times out of ten. For tools that millions of people increasingly turn to for quick answers, that's a remarkable batting average in the wrong direction.

The findings land at a particularly awkward moment: AI companies have been eager to position their products as trusted information assistants, while researchers keep finding that when it comes to high-stakes civic topics, these tools are less "knowledgeable friend" and more "confidently wrong acquaintance."

Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, fabricated a skin condition called bixonimania and seeded it across the internet via a fake university, a fake researcher named "the Lying Loser" (in Croatian), and a preprint paper funded by "the Galactic Triad" and thanking Professor Ross Geller. She expected human moderators or AI filters to catch it. They did not. Multiple popular AI chatbots began suggesting bixonimania as a possible diagnosis for users describing eye discomfort after screen use.

Worse, the fake paper was cited in a real peer-reviewed journal, which only boosted the condition's apparent legitimacy in AI training data. The experiment illustrates how thin the line is between "information on the internet" and "medical fact" as far as large language models are concerned — and how little it takes to cross it maliciously.

Steven Rosenbaum's The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality — a buzzy book about how AI distorts reality — turns out to contain more than a half-dozen misattributed or fabricated quotes, discovered by a New York Times review. Rosenbaum admitted he used ChatGPT and Claude during research and writing, and is now working with editors to correct the affected passages.

Among the hallucinated quotes was one falsely attributed to tech journalist Kara Swisher, placed in a chapter about AI lies, in which she supposedly mused that language models are "like a mirror" that reflects "our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface." The real Swisher told the NYT she "never said that," adding that the quote made her "sound like I have a stick up my butt, according to ChatGPT." Rosenbaum, who holds a self-described "Masters Degree in Truth" from NYU, suggested the whole fiasco was a teaching moment — which is one way to describe writing the book on post-AI truth while not fact-checking your AI-generated quotes.

An anonymous conceptual artist posted a cropped image of an authentic 1915 Claude Monet Water Lilies painting — currently hanging in Munich's Neue Pinakothek — with a caption claiming it was AI-generated, and helpfully slapped X's official "Made with AI" label on it for good measure. The internet delivered: 6.7 million views' worth of confident critique followed, with commenters calling it a "cluttered slop" that achieves "like 20% of it" and dissecting its supposedly incoherent colors and missing depth. One person filed a 700-word autopsy of the fake. The painting was not fake.

The mass delete button got a workout once the reveal landed, but screenshots are forever. The episode neatly illustrates what researchers already knew: people's perception of art quality shifts dramatically based on told source rather than actual quality. As one observer put it, most people's judgment about whether something is AI is "wrong and biased by its source." Turns out the real threat to art criticism wasn't AI — it was a label.

A 2025 EY Canada report on loyalty fraud — Points of Attack: Uncovering Cyber Threats and Fraud in Loyalty Systems — turns out to be a masterclass in what GPTZero calls "vibe citing": letting an LLM hallucinate your references so you don't have to. An investigation found broken URLs, nonexistent Gartner documents, a fabricated McKinsey report, and a Forbes article that doesn't exist — all in a 44-page publication credited to two partners and a senior manager at one of the world's biggest consulting firms.

The damage doesn't stop at embarrassment. The report has since been cited in a Canberra Times article syndicated to over 60 Australian newspapers, and Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity have all been caught surfacing its hallucinated claims in response to queries. A fake McKinsey citation was apparently laundered from an obscure fintech blog, which itself made up the source — a game of telephone where every player is an AI and nobody checks the tape.

A video circulating on Threads claimed to show a U.S. Navy warship ablaze following an Iranian attack — complete with a caption insisting "This is not AI." It was, in fact, very much AI. The Hive Moderation detection tool rated it 84.4% likely AI-generated, and the telltale signs were all there: unnaturally smooth fire, water that refused to react to a supposed inferno, and ships doing the subtle warp-and-flicker dance that AI video generators still haven't figured out.

For context, while Iran did target USS Truxtun, USS Rafael Peralta, and USS Mason in early May 2026, U.S. Central Command confirmed none of the vessels were hit. No major news outlet reported any warship being damaged — a rather significant detail that AI-generated doom-scrolling content is under no obligation to acknowledge.

A syndicated 64-page summer supplement published in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer included a summer reading list full of books that simply do not exist — titles and summaries alike conjured entirely by AI. Freelance writer Marco Buscaglia, working for King Features Syndicate (a Hearst unit), admitted he "just kind of republished this list that [an AI program] spit out" without fact-checking it, exposing two major newspapers to widespread public mockery.

Buscaglia accepted blame and his subsequent firing, while King Features claimed his AI use violated their "strict policy." The Sun-Times' parent, Chicago Public Media, pulled the section from its e-paper, promised refunds to print subscribers, and launched an investigation into other content in the section — since Buscaglia acknowledged using AI elsewhere in the supplement and couldn't guarantee any of it was properly vetted. The Sun-Times Guild summed it up neatly, condemning the "slop syndication."

The Mississippi Free Press published an opinion column on April 7 before discovering it was AI-generated and its supposed author was entirely fictional — fake name, fake headshot, fake social media profiles, and a résumé linking to a company whose editor had already caught the same person running the same con. The ruse only unraveled when the phantom columnist submitted an invoice that didn't match their name.

Further digging revealed a "raft" of similar AI-generated submissions from other fake authors, apparently originating outside the country — none of which were published. The outlet has since pulled three additional queued columns showing similar red flags, and is now working on a formal AI policy, staff training, and tighter vetting. As for AI detectors: the editor notes they're not very reliable, which is a fun problem to have when the fakes are getting better every day.

Two days before the New Hampshire presidential primary, voters received a robocall featuring a convincing AI-generated imitation of President Biden's voice — urging them to skip the primary and "save your vote for November." The call even opened with Biden's signature "What a bunch of malarkey!" before proceeding to deliver exactly that. The Biden campaign confirmed he recorded no such message, and the New Hampshire attorney general launched an investigation, calling it an apparent felony-level attempt to suppress votes.

The call's callback number — a clever touch — was routed to Kathleen Sullivan, treasurer of a PAC encouraging Democrats to write Biden in on the ballot. Sullivan, suddenly fielding mysterious calls, connected the dots and filed a complaint with the AG's office. In New Hampshire, using fraudulent information to deter voting is a felony. The attorney general helpfully reminded voters that participating in the primary would not, in fact, prevent them from voting in November — a clarification that shouldn't need to be made, and yet, here we are.