Fittingly today, the day after April Fools’ Day, is officially International Fact-Checking Day. If you are attuned to misinformation like I am, you might feel like everyday is a journey through a barrage of AI fake stories, pictures and video. You eventually land on the truth – a story of interest or a piece of helpful information – but the task is arduous, and even when you arrive your AI-senses are buzzing so much that you begin to question the truth itself. AI can be useful. It can also be exhausting to navigate.
The pace of change makes this even more difficult. In the twelve months since the last Fact-Checking Day, the tools available to anyone with a browser have crossed boundaries of both imagination and integrity. Here are three notable highlights:
- Google’s Gemini introduced a tool that lets anyone upload a real person’s photo and generate realistic video with fabricated voice and dialogue. Anyone. Any person.
- OpenAI’s Sora made it easy to insert yourself, or anyone else, into video as a convincing cameo. No notice required. It was retired in March 2026, but the door it opened was not.
- Kling AI rapidly advanced face-swapping video, enabling anyone to create high-fidelity impersonations. Zoom calls may never be the same.
At a conference of journalists ten years ago, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) introduced the annual Fact Checking Day. It recognized the increase in online misinformation campaigns, and their impact on the media. How it could misguide readers and voters alike. There were real world impacts and more importantly, a need for real world solutions such as digital and media literacy. A topic Jeffrey D. Camm and I wrote about in our book Data Duped: How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation.
The founders at the London School of Economics might have known then that there was a decline in traditional news organizations, with readership falling and more people getting their “news” from social media. They may have known currently 54% of people in a Pew study shared that social media was their primary news source. Perhaps they foresaw that influencers, not professional journalists, would soon become influencer-reporters relied upon by 21% of U.S. adults. Their reporting being a mix of facts, opinions, and generous amounts of AI.
In a society already saturated with generative AI, the real world is getting harder to identify. Maybe this is exactly where we are at this moment. The foolery of April First is lost on a world that no longer exists.
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