When Camille François, a longstanding qualified on disinformation, despatched an e mail to her team late past 12 months, quite a few ended up perplexed.
Her concept started by boosting some seemingly valid worries: that on-line disinformation — the deliberate spreading of wrong narratives generally built to sow mayhem — “could get out of manage and come to be a enormous threat to democratic norms”. But the text from the main innovation officer at social media intelligence team Graphika soon turned relatively additional wacky. Disinformation, it study, is the “grey goo of the internet”, a reference to a nightmarish, conclusion-of-the planet circumstance in molecular nanotechnology. The solution the e mail proposed was to make a “holographic holographic hologram”.
The weird e mail was not in fact composed by François, but by laptop code she had designed the concept — from her basement — working with text-building synthetic intelligence technologies. When