When it comes to disinformation, “social media took the cost of distribution to zero, and generative AI takes the cost of generation to zero,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Large language models such as GPT-4 make it easy to produce misleading news articles or social-media posts in huge quantities.

And AI can produce more than text. Cloning a voice using AI used to require minutes, or even hours, of sample audio. Last year, however, researchers at Microsoft unveiled VALL-E, an AI model that is able to clone a person’s voice from just a three-second clip of them speaking, and make it say any given text.