In new research, Filippo Lancieri, Laura Edelson, and Stefan Bechtold explore how the political economy of artificial intelligence regulation is shaped by the strategic behavior of governments, technology companies, and other agents.

“You could have reasonable security and trusted safety regulation without necessarily inhibiting the ability to innovate,” said John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation at Northeastern University. “I’m sure there’s some expense incurred, but it seems to me it’s like a useful exercise to continually force the labs to grapple with the potential harms that could be done with the models.” | CBS Austin

John Wihbey’s class AI and Media Industries is designed to get students working with AI to understand the uses –– and limits –– of these tools on journalism, social media and public relations.

New research from IDI’s Pranav Goel and David Lazer investigates how social media users can repurpose factually true information from reliable sources to advance misleading narratives. They demonstrate this prevalent form of misinformation by identifying articles from reliable sources that are frequently co-shared with (shared by users who also shared) ‘fake’ news on social media, and concurrently extracting narratives present in fake news content and claims fact checked as false. They find that narratives present in misinformation content are significantly more likely to occur in co-shared articles than in articles from the same reliable sources that are not co-shared, consistent with users using information from mainstream sources to enhance the credibility and reach of potentially misleading claims.