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Alternative Truths: Using Technology to Distort Scientific Research
For all the good that technology has brought, there has been an underside to it that is disturbing. Technology has made it easy to distort and lie. Tools like Photoshop and more recently tools based on AI make it easy to create fake but realistic images and videos.
Technology has made it possible to cheaply and quickly generate fake images and fictional text that can be broadcast to millions of social network followers and news organizations. It’s also happening in the world of scientific research.
Lee Rainie, director at the Pew Research Center, said that “a key tactic of the new anti-truthers is not so much to get people to believe in false information. It’s to create enough doubt that people will give up trying to find the truth, and distrust the institutions trying to give them the truth.”
Some researchers now suggest that the ability to generate fake images and data easily will make it much more difficult to police and identify scientific articles that are based on fudged or fake data. The research concludes that “integrity is under assault by certain entities who wish to circumvent standard research protocols. Instead of generating photographs of their actual work, they can instead generate them using artificial-intelligence applications. Generating fake photographs in this way could allow miscreants to publish research papers without doing any real research.”
