AI Disinfo Hub

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has long been a challenge for the disinformation field, enabling the manipulation of content and accelerating its spread. Recent technical developments have exponentially increased these challenges. While AI offers opportunities for legitimate purposes, it is also widely generated and disseminated across the internet, causing – intentionally or not – harm and deception.

This hub intends to assist you to better understand how AI is impacting the disinformation field.  To be up-to-date on the latest developments, we will collect the latest Neural News and Trends and include upcoming events and job opportunities that you cannot miss.
 

Are you more into podcast and video content? You will find a repository of podcasts and webinars in AI Disinfo Multimedia, while AI Disinfo in Depth will feature research reports from academia and civil society organisations. This section will cover the burning questions related to the regulation of AI technologies and their use. In addition to this, the Community working in the intersections of AI and disinformation will have a dedicated space where initiatives and resources will be listed, as well as useful tools.

In short, this hub is your go-to resource for understanding the impact of AI on disinformation and finding ways to combat it.

Here, researchers, policymakers, and the public can access reliable tools and insights to navigate this complex landscape. Together, we’re building a community to tackle these challenges head-on, promoting awareness and digital literacy.

Join us in the fight against AI-driven disinformation. Follow us and share with the community!

NEURAL NEWS & TRENDS

We've curated a selection of articles from external sources that delve into the topic from different perspectives. Keep exploring the latest news and publications on AI and disinformation!

News
News

TechCrunch: Meta is on the spot for two separate decisions. On one hand, it has reversed course on a highly controversial feature for its new AI image generator, Muse Image, which allowed users to tag public Instagram profiles and generate pictures using faces from those posts without notifying the account owners. Privacy advocates had sharply criticized the feature, pointing out that the opt-out mechanism was buried deep in settings and designed with nearly identical on/off toggle states that made accidental activation easy. Following widespread public backlash over privacy and consent violations, Meta officially announced it is removing the feature. On the other hand, On the other hand, a WIRED investigation reveals that hundreds of contractors on a separate Meta project posed as teenagers to test how rival chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI handle suicide, drugs, and sex. The project saw more than 45,000 prompts sent to competitors in a single round, with none of the three companies aware the testing was happening

Agora Digitale Transformation: Behind every AI-generated news answer sits a hidden editorial choice about which sources get to speak. A new study by the Agora Digitale Transformation research centre in Berlin analysed how AI models respond to questions about news and what biases might arise, and highlights the lack of transparency in the selection of sources when providing answers. Based on 675 queries across five topics to five AI systems in Germany (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Perplexity), the results point to a narrow source base: while ChatGPT and Perplexity primarily used journalistic sources for their news searches, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI summarisation relied more heavily on government and civil society sources. On occasion, private blogs and social media content are also included in the results. As an example of a broader disinformation risk, Claude referenced domains from the Kremlin-linked Pravda network on several occasions.

PLOS One: LLMs are capable of producing high-quality impersonated content in debate settings, and this content is often perceived as authentic when attributed to real people. In one experiment, researchers took genuine questions and answers from Question Time, one of the most-watched political talk shows on UK television, where politicians, journalists, and other public figures respond to audience questions on the week’s news. They then asked GPT-4 to generate responses impersonating each panellist. After compiling these paired sets of real and AI-generated answers, they conducted a UK-representative survey of nearly 1,000 people. Respondents rated the AI-generated impersonations as more authentic, relevant, and coherent than the panellists’ actual answers, even though, in roughly half the cases, what the AI “said” did not match what the person had actually said on air.

Independent: TikTok is planning to cut around 300 jobs from its Dublin-based trust and safety team as part of a restructuring that will see the platform rely more heavily on AI for content moderation. The company says that 97 per cent of content removed was taken down by automated technologies between January and April this year, and that 99 per cent of content removed by AI is taken down before anyone has reported it. Some affected moderators told The Independent they do not believe the technology is ready to replace human oversight.

404 Media: AI-generated images of impossible flowers are fuelling a seed scam on online marketplaces, where buyers are lured by fake listings for colourful, oversized blooms that do not exist. Fraud experts say the delayed nature of seed growth means victims often miss refund windows before discovering they’ve been duped. Marketplaces have called to better detect suspicious AI-generated listings.

The Bright Minded: The five-day flop of Emma-5, an Italian chatbot pulled in June 2026 due to basic reasoning failures, illustrates the gap between marketing and true technological sovereignty. According to the author of this publication, while Italy’s desire for AI independence is entirely justified to avoid permanent reliance on foreign superpowers, true autonomy cannot be achieved with small, rushed commercial products. Instead, Italy’s real path to independence lies not in a viral chatbot, but in IT4LIA, its massive, industrial-scale supercomputer project equipped with 8,000 GPUs and 82 exaflops of power, which possesses the actual engineering muscle required to secure a seat at the global AI table.

EDMO: European fact-checkers have flagged a wave of unlabelled AI-generated images of hyper-sexualised female football fans going viral during the FIFA World Cup, verified across Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain and Brazil. Platforms’ monetisation schemes are the main driver, with accounts often linked to sites like OnlyFans for further monetisation, while some AI-generated imagery has also been used to funnel users towards far-right and xenophobic content mixed with soft-core pornography. This publication warns of knock-on harms for young people’s body image and self-esteem, and highlights platforms’ persistent failure to enforce labelling policies.

Tech Policy: While everyone worries about deepfakes, a new IPIE report argues text is the bigger threat, finding that false AI-generated text is now often seen as more credible than truthful information, even as people get better at spotting fake images. Drawing on 24 randomized controlled trials with over 33,000 participants, the report also warns that conversational chatbots appear even more persuasive than the static text passages most studies have tested, meaning current estimates of the risk are likely conservative. It proposes a few concrete fixes: “preventive corrective information”, brief explanations of how AI works, given before people encounter misleading content; AI-content labelling, though its effects are inconsistent depending on design, and better, timelier researcher access to platform data to close gaps in the evidence base.

Le Monde: Actress Cate Blanchett has launched RSL Media (rslmedia.org), a free online “human consent registry” designed to protect individuals’ names, faces, and voices from unauthorized use by generative AI platforms. Operating on a simple traffic-light system, green for unrestricted use, yellow for conditional use, and red for a total ban, the platform allows both private citizens and industry professionals to declare how their digital identities can be utilized. Backed by high-profile figures like Steven Soderbergh, Emma Thompson, and Helen Mirren, the initiative aims to establish identity as intellectual property, filling a regulatory gap by pressuring AI tech giants to respect human consent.

NewsGuard: NewsGuard has unveiled a project that could be an early step toward a genuinely promising idea: NewsGuard AI. It is a chatbot that answers news-related queries by drawing exclusively from the roughly 12,000 news outlets its analysts have rated as reliable. Providing fully attributed responses, the tool represents a promising shift toward AI models that value journalistic integrity; unlike platforms that scrape publishers’ content for free, NewsGuard will split its revenue with the media outlets its tool relies on. The chatbot is also connected to NewsGuard’s extensive database of debunks and is programmed with 41 distinct journalistic safeguard instructions to prevent speculation, hallucinations, or the use of unverified training data.

Poynter: Fact-checkers are increasingly turning to AI to help verify claims while remaining wary of the technology’s limitations. Reporting from the GlobalFact 2026 conference, Poynter explores how organisations are using AI to speed up workflows while grappling with concerns over hallucinations, bias and transparency, stressing that human oversight remains essential. One example comes from the UK, where fact-checking organisation Full Fact is using AI to combat AI-generated election misinformation with tools that monitor around 350,000 sentences a day across major social platforms to flag potential falsehoods for human review. Writing in Nieman Lab, Steve Nowottny argues AI has become both a growing challenge during elections and an essential tool for scaling fact-checking efforts.

NewsGuard: Major brands including Disney, Adobe and Amazon are inadvertently funding AI-generated misinformation through online advertising, according to a NewsGuard investigation. The report found adverts from household names appearing alongside fabricated stories on AI-generated content farms, highlighting how automated ad systems can end up financing low-quality and misleading content without brands’ knowledge.

Pew Research Center: Why do more Americans than ever rely on AI, while trusting it less and less? According to the June 2026 report by the Pew Research Center, roughly 49% of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, a sharp increase from 33% in 2024. Yet this growing reliance is not matched by growing trust: 60% of Americans now read AI-generated search summaries at the top of their results, but only 29% of chatbot users say they actually trust the information these tools provide. Majorities express concern that AI is advancing too quickly, that it poses risks to personal privacy, and that it will ultimately have a net-negative impact on society, even as current users report that chatbots genuinely help with workplace productivity, creativity, and information gathering.

Velora: A study by Velora points to a major flaw facing researchers who use AI tools in their work: AI research tools are prone to what could be called “fact laundering”, accurately retrieving data but citing secondary blogs or content farms instead of the primary source, making it impossible for editors to verify where the information actually came from. Velora, which builds its own AI research agent, found that every product it tested, including offerings from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as its own tool, exhibits this pattern to some degree, ranging from as low as 5% of briefs at best to nearly half at worst.

MIT Media Lab researchers: A new study reveals both the potential of AI to assist in detecting false information and its limited effect in fostering lasting media literacy skills: a month-long MIT Media Lab study found that while debating with an AI chatbot immediately boosts fact-checking accuracy by 21%, it fails to build durable skills. Once the AI is removed, users’ independent ability to spot disinformation actually drops by 15.3% below their initial baseline by week four, driven by a growing failure to detect fabricated content as active critical thinking gives way to passive reliance on the tool.

Events, jobs & announcements

This free webinar explores how modern investigators and legal teams can unlock the full value of AI by shifting their mindset beyond simple keyword searches. Using practical examples and emerging innovations, including Relativity’s aiR legal AI tools, the session covers how to integrate AI across the entire investigative workflow to responsibly uncover facts, connect evidence, and build stronger case strategies.

Register here. 

What it is: A 21-month, fully remote, public-interest research fellowship ($68,000 – $80,000/year) running from September 2026 to May 2028 under the institute’s AI & Democracy initiative.

What you will do: You will join a qualitative research project analyzing how generative AI is weaponized to supercharge deepfakes, financial fraud, and online scams. You will conduct focus groups and interviews with victims and youth involved in high-risk digital subcultures (like crypto, drop-shipping, and “hustle culture”). The ultimate goal is to translate these findings into concrete, bipartisan policy recommendations for tech governance.

Schmidt Sciences is recruiting AI Institute Fellows-in-Residence for a 12–18 month programme for recent PhD graduates in AI and computer science.

📍Location: New York City (on-site) | ⏳ Fixed-term | 💼 $150,000/year
🗓️ Applications: Rolling (apply early) | 🗓️ Cohort starting in 2026

Fellows split their time between independent AI research and supporting the development of the AI & Advanced Computing Institute, including grantmaking exploration and programme design. Priority areas include multi-agent systems and AI agent interoperability, AI for scientific discovery, trustworthy AI and alignment, AI’s impact on the labour market, and hardware-enabled verification of AI agreements.

Alice is hiring across a range of roles focused on shielding “communicative tech” from emerging risks, online harms, and AI-driven threats. The company unites intelligence analysts, security researchers, and infrastructure engineers to build trust and safety frameworks for generative AI models, applications, and digital platforms.

📍 Locations: Israel (Ramat Gan), UK, and Remote

🧭 Active teams: Intelligence, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Success, and HR

🗓️ Applications: Rolling

Key Focus Areas: Open roles span trust & safety infrastructure, fraud threat analysis, Application and Android security research, AI software engineering, and web intelligence (Webint).

The Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras is recruiting for a range of research, technical, and programme-oriented roles focused on advancing ethical and responsible AI. Opportunities span areas such as AI research, engineering, governance and policy, and programme management within an interdisciplinary research environment.

🗓️ Applications: Vary by role (no single deadline indicated)

AI & Disinfo Multimedia

A collection of webinars and podcasts from us and the wider community, dedicated to countering AI-generated disinformation.

Webinars

Our own and community webinar collection exploring the intersections of AI and disinformation

Podcasts

Community podcasts exploring the intersections of AI and disinformation

AI Disinfo in depth

A repository of research papers and reports from academia and civil society organisations alongside articles addressing key questions related with the regulation of AI technologies and their use. It also features a collection of miscellaneous readings.

Research

A compact yet potent library dedicated to what has been explored in the realm of AI and disinformation

policy & regulations

A look at regulation and policies implemented on AI and disinformation

Miscellaneous readings

Recommended reading on AI and disinformation

Community

A list of tools to fight AI-driven disinformation, along with projects and initiatives facing the challenges posed by AI. The ultimate aim is to foster cooperation and resilience within the counter-disinformation community.

Tools

A repository of tools to tackle AI-manipulated and/or AI-generated disinformation.

Synthetic image detection 

Video deepfake detection

AI-generated video detection

Deepfake detector

AI-generated image detection

AI-generated text detection

AI-generated text detection

AI-generated text detection

AI-generated text detection

AI-generated text detection

AI Voice Detector

AI-generated audio, video, text detector

Conspiracy debunking bot

Analysis, Data Science, and OSINT

AI Research Pilot by Henk van Ess is a lightweight, browser-based tool designed to help investigators, journalists, and researchers get more out of AI, not by using AI as a source, but as a guide to real sources.

LLM Journalism Tool Advisor is an interactive guide designed to cut through the noise, by walking you through a simple, step-by-step decision tree to pinpoint the best tool and the best strategy for your immediate task.

Digital Digging offers a handbook with seven strategies on how to identify AI-generated.

A new AI-powered tool that identifies where a photo was taken by analysing visual clues in the image. Launched by Where Is This Photo, it uses machine-learning models to predict locations — useful for quick geolocation checks or curiosity-driven searches.

Faktabaari has launched an interactive game that trains users to spot whether images are real or AI-generated, a quick, playful way to build digital and visual literacy.

The Agence France‑Presse (AFP) Digital Course, supported by the Google News Initiative, offers a 75-minute module on how AI is reshaping the information ecosystem, common types of AI-generated misinformation, and best practices for verification.

Image Whisperer is an experimental online image authenticity checker, created by Henk van Ess, designed to help journalists, researchers and fact-checkers evaluate whether a still image is likely authentic, manipulated, or AI-generated

The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) has launched a practical verification guide for journalists to assess whether text, image, audio or video is likely AI-generated.

Rather than a single software product, it teaches reporters a structured workflow combining quick checks, deeper analysis, and multiple verification techniques under real-world time pressure. 

AI Community Notes Tracker is a live monitoring tool developed by Indicator, that tracks the share of AI-generated or AI-assisted Community Notes on X. It helps researchers and practitioners see how AI is being used in X’s crowdsourced fact-checking/contextual annotation system and understand shifts in platform moderation practices.

Deezer has launched the AI Music Detector, a web tool that scans your playlists across 20 different streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music, to identify and flag synthetic, AI-generated tracks.

 

An AI-powered suite of fact-checking tools developed by the charity Full Fact. It helps journalists, researchers, and fact-checkers monitor media at scale, transcribe audio/video in real time, and automatically detect when known misinformation is being repeated.

NewsGuard has launched a real-time detection datastream identifying over 3,000 “AI content farms”, websites generating large volumes of undisclosed AI-written content to spread misinformation or capture ad revenue. Combining automated detection (Pangram Labs) with human verification, the tool helps platforms, advertisers, and researchers identify low-quality AI-generated sites and mitigate their impact on the information ecosystem.

Initiatives & organisations

Organisations working in the field and initiatives launched by community members to address the challenges posed by AI in the disinformation field.

veraAI is a research and development project focusing on disinformation analysis and AI supported verification tools and services.

AI against disinformation is a cluster of six European Commission co-funded research projects, which include research on AI methods for countering online disinformation. The focus of ongoing research is on detection of AI-generated content and development of AI-powered tools and technologies that support verification professionals and citizens with content analysis and verification.

AI Forensics is a European non-profit that investigates influential and opaque algorithms. They hold major technology platforms accountable by conducting independent and high-profile technical investigations to uncover and expose the harms caused by their algorithms. They empower the research community with tools, datasets and methodologies to strengthen the AI audit ecosystem.

AI Tracking Center is intended to highlight the ways that generative AI has been deployed to turbocharge misinformation operations and unreliable news. The Center includes a selection of NewsGuard’s reports, insights, and debunks related to artificial intelligence

AlgorithmWatch is a non-governmental, non-profit organisation based in Berlin and Zurich. They fight for a world where algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) do not weaken justice, human rights, democracy and sustainability, but strengthen them.

The European AI & Society Fund empowers a diverse ecosystem of civil society organisations to shape policies around AI in the public interest and galvanises the philanthropic sector to sustain this vital work.

The European AI Media Observatory is a knowledge platform that monitors and curates relevant research on AI in media, provides expert perspectives on the potentials and challenges that AI poses for the media sector and allows stakeholders to easily get in touch with relevant experts in the field via their directory.

GZERO’s newsletter offers exclusive insights into our rapidly changing world, covering topics such as AI-driven disinformation and a weekly exclusive edition written by Ian Bremmer.

PR Hall of Shame is a watchdog-style list, developed by Press Gazette, exposing brands and PR networks linked to AI-generated “fake experts” quoted in the press, helping journalists spot credibility risks and reduce synthetic ‘expert’ manipulation.

AI for Good is the United Nations’ leading platform on Artificial Intelligence for sustainable development. Its mission is to leverage the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive progress toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Omdena is a collaborative AI platform where a global community of changemakers unites to co-create real-world tech solutions for social impact. It combines collective intelligence with hands-on collaboration, empowering the community from across all industries to learn, build, and deploy meaningful AI projects. 

Faked Up curates a library of academic studies and reports on digital deception and misinformation, offering accessible insights for subscribers. The collection includes studies from 2020 onward, organised into clusters like misinformation prevalence, fact-checking effects, and AI-generated deceptive content. It serves as a practical resource for understanding and addressing misinformation challenges.

AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems. Like similar databases in aviation and computer security, the AI Incident Database aims to learn from experience to prevent or mitigate bad outcomes.

The TGuard project develops innovative methods for detecting disinformation in social media and formulating effective strategies for preventing AI-generated false reports.

The AI-on-Demand (AIoD) Platform is a European hub for trustworthy AI, offering open access to models, datasets, tools, and educational resources. Backed by the EU, it supports researchers, innovators, and public institutions in developing and sharing responsible AI technologies aligned with European values.

BBC Verify Live is a real-time news feed that gives audiences a behind-the-scenes look at how BBC journalists verify information. Using tools like open-source intelligence, satellite imagery, and data analysis, the BBC Verify team investigates disinformation, checks facts, and authenticates content as news breaks. Available on the BBC News homepage and app, this initiative aims to boost transparency and trust in journalism, especially in the face of rising threats from disinformation and AI-generated content.

Deepfake Glossary by Reality Defender: The Deepfake Glossary is a practical guide to the terms shaping today’s synthetic threat landscape. Review it to stay ahead of the evolving terminology.

The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), together with INECO, has created the AI and Diversity Observatory, a pioneering project that seeks to identify biases in artificial intelligence from an inclusive perspective. Collaborating with vulnerable groups and human rights organizations, the Observatory analyzes concerns and proposals to promote equitable and non-discriminatory AI. In addition, it will monitor trends and issues related to AI in society.

Prebunking at Scale is a new European initiative led by Full Fact, Maldita.es, and EFCSN that uses AI to detect emerging misinformation narratives early and help fact-checkers pre-emptively counter false claims before they go viral, especially on short-form video platforms.

The Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight is a new open curriculum offering free training materials to help journalists better understand, investigate, and report on artificial intelligence and its societal impacts.

The Data Tank is new initiative designed to help small and medium public-interest media organisations respond to the challenges posed by generative AI. The project brings together media outlets, researchers, regulators, and civil society to explore collective solutions such as data collaboratives, knowledge commons, innovative licensing models, and advocacy coalitions, aiming to strengthen media sustainability, bargaining power, and content integrity in the face of extractive AI practices.

PR Hall of Shame by Press Gazette, is a watchdog-style list exposing brands and PR networks linked to AI-generated “fake experts” quoted in the press, helping journalists spot credibility risks and reduce synthetic ‘expert’ manipulation.

The AI Resist List is a crowdsourced, public-interest initiative that maps and tracks global resistance to automated systems and algorithmic harms. The platform serves as a living archive documenting civil society protests, labor strikes, legal challenges, and grassroots campaigns aimed at halting or regulating harmful AI deployments worldwide. It is designed to connect researchers, journalists, and activists looking to study the socio-technical impacts of AI and the communities actively organizing against them.

CleanFeed is a collaborative research and tech initiative (March 2026 – March 2029) designed to counter AI-generated “slop” and coordinated disinformation through structural media provenance. Led by Deutsche Welle (DW Innovation) and funded by the German Federal Ministry (BMFTR), the project moves past reactive fact-checking by embedding content authenticity frameworks (like C2PA) and open protocols directly into journalistic distribution feeds.

Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab) by Data & Society is an initiative dedicated to developing methodologies and practical toolkits for conducting empirical, community-centered algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) to ensure AI systems are evaluated for real-world consequences before deployment.

Last updated: 10/07/2026

The articles and resources listed in this hub do not necessarily represent EU DisinfoLab’s position. This hub is an effort to give voice to all members of the community countering AI-generated disinformation.