Misinformation

A fan account with a blue Meta Verified checkmark posted an AI-generated image of actress Mia Goth wearing a T-shirt reading "MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN," timed to news of her divorce from Shia LaBeouf. Entertainment outlets including People and OK! covered it as authentic. Hundreds of thousands of people liked it. Goth's representatives say she has no social media presence on any platform and had filed multiple complaints with Instagram to remove the account before the image went viral.

Meta's verification program, which sells blue checkmarks to accounts that are not run by the person depicted, bears some of the blame here. The account was labeled as fan-run, but the badge created enough ambiguity that industry insiders were fooled. Meta's content rules require AI labels on photorealistic videos of real people, but include a carve-out exempting still images. Meta removed the account after The Verge reached out, citing impersonation policy.

OpenAI disclosed that it blocked accounts linked to an Iran-based network that used its models to produce nearly 100 articles published under fictitious bylines across more than a dozen English-language websites. The operators fed ChatGPT instructions in Persian to polish articles, adapt them to individual publication submission guidelines, draft cover letters to editors, and generate full biographies for invented freelance writers. Seven Western personas were created, including "Noah Lamington," "Erwin Hawkins," and "Sofia Gonzalez." The activity dates to July 2025.

The targeted outlets ranged from niche policy journals to platforms with substantial audiences. London-based Middle East Monitor, with nearly two million Facebook followers, published at least 21 articles under four bylines OpenAI identified as fictitious. Daily Kos's unmoderated community section also carried material. Beyond articles, the network used ChatGPT to generate batches of social media comments framing the US as an aggressor, Israel as an unreliable ally, and Iran as a victim, and produced hostile reply campaigns targeting Iran International, a Persian-language broadcaster critical of Tehran.

A user on Mumsnet asking for a "sanity check" about a family dispute involving a neurodivergent uncle got back something unexpected: a raw AI prompt titled AIBU Response Schema v.1.0, complete with instructions to write an "interpersonal reasonableness" post, definitions of Mumsnet abbreviations, and directives not to "imply a sick child owes social performance." The prompt was meant to stay hidden. It did not.

Mumsnet offered three successive explanations: the prompt came from a title-suggestion tool using an OpenAI model; then it came from the user's own computer; then founder Justine Roberts confirmed it came from Mumsnet's systems after all, describing it as an error on OpenAI's side. Users were unconvinced at each stage, and some copy-pasted the prompt into an AI chatbot to confirm it produced a full forum reply. The incident arrived against an already uncomfortable backdrop: Mumsnet's monthly unique users fell 19% in 2025 to 6.1 million, and the site's own annual report had flagged that it was "embedding AI tools to improve productivity and enhance the user experience."

During Quebec's recent provincial election, an estimated 40% of voters turned to AI chatbots for election information. Because nearly all Quebec newsrooms had blocked chatbots from scraping their content, those chatbots went looking elsewhere — and found an error-filled hobby website built by AI. According to McGill researchers presenting to a House of Commons committee, that single junk site accounted for 39% of voting advice ChatGPT gave in the final three weeks of the campaign.

No one was trying to manipulate the election. The news outlets were protecting their content rights, the hobbyist meant no harm, and the chatbot was just doing what chatbots do: finding the path of least resistance to a "satisfactory" answer. The researchers described it as "a confluence of events" that likely fed false information to a large number of voters. ChatGPT also flip-flopped on whether to recommend a political party, changing its answer from one day to the next. A separate incident saw a chatbot direct would-be campaign volunteers to the wrong party's office.

Google has updated its Search quality guidelines to explicitly prohibit fabricated author profiles, including AI-generated headshots, made-up names, and false credentials, declaring them a "signal of a low-quality page." The change followed a Futurism investigation into Brown Brothers Media, a network of acquired news sites that invented fake journalists, plagiarized real reporting, and drew tens of millions of monthly page views largely through Google Search before abruptly shutting down after the story ran.

The new guidance closes a gap that had allowed content mills to game Google's E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) framework by simply slapping a headshot and a bio on AI-generated filler. Similar operations have since surfaced in Canada, Florida, and Rhode Island. The irony isn't lost: Google is now policing fake AI content in search results while simultaneously pushing its own AI-generated summaries that critics say are draining traffic from the independent journalism these mills were already cannibalizing.

An Instagram account called jean_philanthrope posted hundreds of videos of the same man: tweed suit, bow tie, aggressively bleached blonde bob, twirly moustache, shadowboxing at Parisian road junctions and cafe tables. One video was viewed 35.9 million times. The man does not exist.

The character is tied to the JEANPHIL meme coin, and Dexerto reports it was likely built as marketing for it. According to Coinbase, the token surged on 20 September to a high of $0.02845 the following day, then lost more than 99 percent of its value before that day was over. Followers who hadn't worked it out found out in the comments. "I never get tricked by AI," one wrote. "I was tricked by AI." A rival account has since launched Archibald Brown, an English version who shadowboxes in public in the same format.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden has been posting AI-generated videos to X showing his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke saying things she never said, including that she's running for Congress "to take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare." The videos carry automatic labels identifying them as made with Grok Imagine, xAI's image and video generator. On Sept. 30, Cooke's attorneys sent Van Orden a cease-and-desist letter warning that the videos may constitute defamation under Wisconsin law, and that they were "monitoring" his accounts.

Van Orden's response was to post another Grok-generated video, this one featuring a red AI duck shouting "Cease and desist!" His campaign described Cooke's legal action as a "full blow tantrum." Cooke, for her part, noted the irony that the deepfakes were produced using the same AI infrastructure Van Orden had supported with federal tax breaks.

The White House launched America.gov on Tuesday as a flagship AI chatbot "front door" to the federal government, promising fast and accurate information. Within seconds of going live, it told users that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election — complete with Electoral College and popular vote totals. Asked about the $5,000 dividend Trump promised at the GOP convention, it noted the president's own stated condition that Republicans first win both chambers of Congress.

The site's other early achievements: confirming the Pentagon's legal name is still the Department of Defense (not the "Department of War"), crashing its chat function within minutes of launch, and featuring homepage photos that appear to include a stock image from a Beijing-based photographer. By 2027, officials say users will be able to complete government forms through the portal. For now, its primary function appears to be fact-checking its own creator.

The New South Wales government announced new laws against AI-doctored rental listings on Friday, and to illustrate the problem, linked to a supposedly manipulated ad showing a Sydney apartment with an unlikely view of Bondi Beach. The listing was genuine: the "view" is a $5,000 commissioned mural of Bondi painted on an internal courtyard wall, confirmed still in place by the agency IB Property, which stated the image had not been "altered or digitally generated using AI, Photoshop or any other image-editing software."

The laws themselves address a real issue. Under the legislation, NSW real estate businesses face fines of up to $22,000 for failing to disclose AI-generated or digitally altered property images, targeting practices like removing walls, adding nonexistent landscaping, or staging rooms to misrepresent scale. The regulations take effect in early 2027. Better regulation minister Anoulack Chanthivong did not respond directly to questions about the mural, instead reissuing a statement about standing "on the side of renters."

OpenAI has introduced ads into ChatGPT, and Google is testing sponsored answers inside Gemini conversations. Both systems appear to use real-time bidding and microtargeting — the same infrastructure that already powers behavioral advertising across the web — now embedded directly into the AI response itself, not off to the side in a banner.

Researchers publishing in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing argue this creates risks that existing defenses aren't built to handle. Fact-checkers depend on claims being public and persistent; a fabricated allegation delivered privately inside a chatbot conversation may never surface for scrutiny. Existing legislation like the EU's Digital Services Act was designed for search engines and social media, not conversational AI. And AI companies' promises that ad revenue won't influence answer substance are, as the researchers put it, potentially accompanied by a quiet "for now."

A voice-cloned, lip-synced video of Mark Zuckerberg falsely claiming "there is no water left for humans to survive more than one year" circulated thousands of times on social media, directing viewers to buy a cryptocurrency called "World Water Reserve." The original footage came from a White House dinner in September 2025; Zuckerberg said nothing about water. A fake CNBC screenshot captioned "Zuckerberg announces $200M commitment to World Water Reserve" was bundled with the video to add credibility.

University of Reading deepfake researcher Dr. Dominic Lees identified the manipulation: a voice clone of Zuckerberg layered over the original audio, with a faint music track added specifically to mask the acoustic mismatch between the clone and the White House dinner room. Full Fact, which receives funding from Meta as part of Facebook's Third-Party Fact Checking Programme, rated the clip "altered."

A man on X received a call from someone who sounded "100%" like his wife, asking him to read out a credit card number to pay for gas. His actual wife was sitting next to him at the time. The caller's voice had a slightly unusual rhythm — what the man described as a "weird cadence" — but was otherwise convincing enough that he kept the conversation going to probe the scam rather than hang up. He suspects it was a real-time voice filter rather than a fully generated AI call, based on how quickly the responses came.

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu picked up the post and recommended that families establish "verbal passwords" to verify callers. "Sadly, AI is so advanced that we cannot tell real from fake easily anymore," he wrote. The advice mirrors what the original poster had already suggested — a low-tech fix for a problem that keeps getting cheaper to run.

An AI-generated image purporting to show Welles Crowther — the "Man in the Red Bandana" who saved at least a dozen lives on September 11, 2001 — went viral this week. When Gizmodo ran it through four major AI detection tools, every one of them failed. ChatGPT declared it "very likely is not AI-generated" and said it had features "you'd expect from a real news photograph." Grok called it "a well-known photograph from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Claude decided it was a reenactment still from a documentary. Google's AI Overview went furthest off-script, identifying it as a scene from a 1999 disaster miniseries — which would place the image two years before the attacks it supposedly depicts.

Gemini initially claimed it couldn't check for Google's own SynthID watermark, then walked that back only after being pushed. No tool gave a clean, correct answer without prompting. There are no known authentic photos of Crowther in action that day, and a basic reverse image search shows the image had never been published before this week. Roughly 25% of Americans weren't born yet on September 11, 2001, which means the images that circulate online now are doing real historical work — and the tools marketed as safeguards are, at the moment, not up to the job.

AI-generated clips of the Cat in the Hat "terrorising" streets, appearing on doorbell cameras, and threatening to visit named towns spread across TikTok and Instagram, prompting several UK and Irish police forces to issue public statements confirming the reports were fake. Some videos paired the character with scrolling lists of cities or schools said to be visited next; others fabricated news articles and fake police reports to lend the content credibility.

The trend created knock-on risks beyond the obvious misinformation. Children commenting under posts to name their own towns or schools handed strangers enough location detail to pose as someone local. Accounts promoting the content also used it as audience-building bait, funnelling young followers toward other material that, in some cases, included sexualised or age-inappropriate content on platforms with no meaningful moderation.

Cleveland.com, the online home of Ohio's largest newspaper The Plain Dealer, published an AI-generated article under reporter Kaitlin Durbin's byline while she was on her honeymoon — without her knowledge, consent, or review. The story covered a local official's resignation and had no connection to Durbin's reporting beat. "I did not write or review a word of it and it does not pull info from past reporting," she wrote on X. "Does Cleveland.com think they just own my name now?"

The paper's editor, Chris Quinn, called it "a simple mistake, the result of a miscommunication between a couple of editors," and said it was corrected once staff saw Durbin's tweet. The byline has since been removed and replaced with "Cleveland.com Express Desk." The incident lands at an awkward moment: Quinn had published a letter earlier this year calling AI "the future" of newsrooms, and an editor told the Columbia Journalism Review that AI-assisted stories would still reflect "real accountability" because "AI is the assistant, but it's not the journalist."

Two fabricated images depicting protests in Portsmouth circulated on social media following a real demonstration on 6 September 2026, in which hundreds of people blocked roads after around 140 migrants arrived at Eastney ferry port. The fake images — one showing a crowd with police, another showing masked men in black wading into the sea carrying a flag — were identified as AI-generated via embedded SynthID watermarks, as well as visual tells: blurred faces, garbled sign text, and a Spinnaker Tower painted the wrong color.

Fact-checker Full Fact confirmed neither image matched the actual protest location, and that genuine footage of the event had already been published by mainstream media. Many users shared the images without questioning them.

An AI-manipulated video showing a costumed Darth Vader addressing a San Diego Public Safety Committee meeting in support of Flock Safety's license plate-tracking cameras circulated widely on August 20, 2026. CNN, Fox News, UPI, The Hill, and dozens of other outlets picked it up as real news. The City of San Diego's publicly available meeting archive tells a different story: a committee member calls for a speaker named Darth Vader, nobody steps forward, and the meeting moves on.

Side-by-side comparison with the official recording reveals the Vader footage, the supporting audience members, and the altered chyron reading "Non-Agenda Public Comment" are all fabricated. The video's premise — that the Dark Lord of the Sith would endorse surveillance cameras to track rebels "from playground to pool" — was apparently compelling enough that the joke-to-journalism pipeline took under 24 hours.

A Colorado state senator filed what may be the first complaint under the state's deepfake disclosure law after a Libertarian think tank released an AI-generated video depicting her as a grocery store clerk pocketing a customer's change. The Independence Institute made the video to counter Sen. Cathy Kipp's floor remarks defending Proposition NN, which would allow the state to retain up to $4.6 billion in taxpayer refunds otherwise owed under Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

Colorado law requires deepfakes of candidates or sitting lawmakers to include a clearly sized disclosure stating the content is edited and non-authentic. The Independence Institute's disclaimer read: "AI generated content because who gets a human cashier these days?" — and was smaller than the surrounding text. The organization's president, Jon Caldara, argues the law doesn't apply because the video concerns a ballot initiative rather than a candidate, and that it qualifies as satire. The Secretary of State's Office is investigating.

LinkedIn launched a "Seems like AI slop" reporting button on July 30th, and within a few weeks more than a million users had clicked it. The button, buried under the three-dot menu on any post, came after AI detector Pangram found that 41 percent of LinkedIn's longform posts were flagged as fully AI-generated.

The platform's chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says users are "now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop from just a few weeks ago." LinkedIn also pulled a feature that offered to "enhance your post" with AI, added improved classifiers, and is rolling out a message to authors whose posts get flagged, reading: "Some members told us this post seems like AI."

LinkedIn, a platform that spent the last two years drowning in AI-generated executive thought-leadership posts, has introduced a reporting option that lets users flag content as "seems like AI slop." The button uses that exact phrase, not a softer corporate euphemism like "may have been generated with AI."

The feature is a quiet acknowledgment that the site's feed has become a reliable source of AI-written takes on news events, repackaged as personal career wisdom. LinkedIn did not announce it prominently; 404 Media found it through their own testing.