"Disinformation is becoming more sophisticated," Alexandre Alaphilippe talks about global challenges and the role of AI

 Disinformation is becoming more complex and requires diverse skills and perspectives to understand and combat it, says Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EUDisinfo Lab.

In an interview with The Geopost, Alphilippe discusses the biggest challenges related to disinformation. He highlights the importance of artificial intelligence and dwells on the sophisticated operations of state actors – particularly Russian and Chinese ones – that are interfering in public discourse in Europe and beyond.

Full interview:

The Geopost: Can you tell us a little about this year's edition of EUDisinfo Lab?

Alaphilippe: We're in Ljubljana, Slovenia this year, and we're bringing more than 600 participants this year, the largest conference we've ever organized for the counter-disinformation community in Europe, but also beyond. We have participants from America this year. We have participants from South Asia. So it shows how much this phenomenon, disinformation, is becoming extremely complex, extremely dense, and requires a lot of different skills, diversity, and perspectives. We just came out of a session talking about what's happening in terms of propaganda and disinformation in the United States and looking back in history to better understand the roots, to better understand what this means in terms of the new alliance of power between autocrats and corporations, for example.

So our job this year is really to continue to explore these trends on the geographic side, but also to start looking at what the impact of artificial intelligence is. And there's been a lot of discussion about what AI can do, what AI can't do, and it's really interesting to realize that AI is not as important as what happens after it creates deepfakes or AI-generated disinformation. You always need platforms to amplify this information, to distribute it. So all of those questions are going to be central to how we can build collective action together.

The Geopost: What are the new Russian narratives within EU society?

Alaphilippe: We see a continuation of operations that we know very well, like Doppelganger, like Matryoshka, like Storm 1516. So these operations continue. We also look at how these operations, sometimes between different states, between powers, can share some infrastructure. So what are the connections between Russian and Chinese foreign intervention operations. We are exploring this as well and trying to see how this narrative is unfolding, and what is happening, for example, also in the Middle East, which has been at the center of a lot of disinformation propaganda stories.

The Geopost: Is AI the future of fighting disinformation?

Alaphilippe: AI is here, it's not the future. And in both cases, I think the question is less about AI than how we use it and how the platforms around us are deploying it at a very, very high rate. And how can we move away from recommendations from private platforms that have only one interest, which is to recommend their algorithm and not recommend public service and public information.

/The Geopost