Misinformation has ceased to be a system malfunction and has become part of its very logic. One of the most pleasant effects of artificial intelligence – surely because it was unexpected – is that a popular topic of conversation has finally emerged that is even more engaging than football.
AI is the great milestone of our era. In informal chats, people are fascinated by the tricks and achievements obtained with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and in more pretentious forums, the conversation already rises toward geopolitics, the restructuring of employment, the energy challenge, the transformation of the health industry, or the mutation of warfare.
However, it is striking how little reflection there is on its enormous impact on misinformation, given that it is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time. That this issue is glossed over in popular conversation is, indeed, an alarming symptom. A new sign that the truth no longer matters, or that at least it no longer matters as much. And that, paradoxically, remains a feature of misinformation itself.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report places AI-driven misinformation among the most severe short-term threats to global stability. It is not hard to understand why. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce fake images, videos, audio, and texts at a speed, cost, and scale that were unimaginable until very recently. What is to come, as Philippine Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa anticipated to me three years ago, will make the avalanche of misinformation of recent years look like child’s play. She showed me some of the attacks she received on social media. On her mobile phone, I saw all kinds of insults and humiliations, including sexual photomontages, signed by supposed anonymous users. The International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) put the number of messages at over 500,000.
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"It is striking to think that someone would invest so much money to attack me," she explained to me.
What used to require time, technical expertise, and significant economic resources can now be done in minutes. Furthermore, it can be adapted to different audiences due to campaign personalisation, with messages tailored to the psychological, emotional, and, thanks to massive data analysis, individual ideological profile of specific groups of users.
Misinformation is ceasing to be artisanal and is becoming industrial, and we do not have to wait for the future to prove it. We have already seen fake images that become news before anyone can verify their origin, manipulated audio circulating as if it were authentic statements, or content specifically fabricated to feed a particular political emotion.
The problem is no longer just distinguishing the true from the false. It is doing so when the false can be produced much faster than society is capable of verifying it.
For four years I held long conversations with some 140 journalists from different countries, including Ressa herself, to analyse the transformation of our trade. Their cross-testimonies paint an X-ray of a profession at a critical moment: professionals from wealthy countries alongside others who risk their lives to report, reporters from major outlets and independent lone rangers.
Despite the differences, their voices reveal a common diagnosis caused by tech companies: Journalism's great challenge is no longer just reporting what happens, but making it matter – Because the truth, by itself, no longer prevails.
The media, in this juncture where there is a fierce fight for attention, no longer holds the preeminence of yesteryear, when they decided what was relevant, provided context, cross-checked facts, and helped build a public conversation. That position has been profoundly altered by the new standard-setting rules of internet information consumption.
Multinational technology companies have changed the rules of content distribution and, with them, the relationship between relevance and visibility. What is important now competes in the same space with what is viral; explanation competes with reaction, and criteria with the algorithm.
Platforms are not designed to distinguish true from false, but to maximise attention and interaction. And in that competition based on volume, emotion, simplification and conflict usually gain an advantage over nuance, context and uncertainty. Algorithms, designed with a commercial logic, reward the most striking content, regardless of whether it is false, misleading, or deliberately manipulated. As a result, an ecosystem emerges in which information loses density, debate becomes polarised, and trust is eroded. To the point that populism is no longer just a social phenomenon, but a political current that permeates all decisions, with certain algorithmic leaders born or sustained in the heat of interpreting opinion trends and the emotional states of the populations they govern.
Misinformation has thus ceased to be a malfunction of the system and has become part of its logic. It constitutes an architecture designed to influence, confuse and erode societies. It does not confront the truth directly, but rather dilutes it, which makes it more dangerous and effective.
In this context, journalism faces a challenge even greater than the economic and technological transformation it has been addressing for years. It is subjected to a moral test.
It is about maintaining standards in an environment that pushes to lower them, imposing criteria over acceleration, protecting rigour when the rules of digital distribution promote the opposite, and continuing to play in the field of credibility rather than attention.
AI can become an extraordinary tool to improve journalism if its focus is placed on boosting quality and not just speed or volume. There are already numerous examples of data extrapolation and astonishing visual narratives in journalistic outlets.
The value will always lie in obtaining original information, in investigation, in criteria, responsibility, the cross-checking of information, verification, context, credibility, or trust. A society can survive uncertainty, crisis, or conflict, but it can hardly endure the disappearance of truth as a shared reference.
The writer is the editorial general director of Vocento and author of the book 'Periodistas en Tiempos de Oscuridad ’.
This article, first published in Spain by ABC, is shared to mark World News Day, a worldwide campaign highlighting the essential role of journalism in providing facts and clarity.