Countering Disinformation in the Era of Generative AI

This book offers a timely and comprehensive exploration of how generative AI technologies are reshaping the landscape of online disinformation, dramatically lowering the barriers to creating realistic synthetic text, imagery, and audio at scale. While online disinformation has long challenged societies and individuals, the acceleration of generative AI has intensified these risks, making traditional detection and protection measures increasingly inadequate. In response, researchers are developing advanced AI-driven tools and methods to detect, mitigate, and study the rapidly evolving tactics of disinformation campaigns, with emphasis on algorithmic detection, media verification, and the broader implications for information integrity.

Countering Disinformation in the Era of Generative AI brings together leading experts to present both recent misuse cases ― such as synthetic media in political manipulation and AI-generated false narratives ― and state-of-the-art countermeasures, including trustworthy AI solutions co-created with media professionals. The book features thorough coverage of emerging methods for detecting disinformation and synthetic media and analyzing online information environments to. Drawing upon interdisciplinary research and large-scale initiatives such as the Horizon Europe vera.ai project, this volume addresses the needs of diverse stakeholders ― from researchers and journalists to policymakers ― offering not only technical depth for specialists, but also an accessible overview of the latest advances in AI-powered disinformation defense.

Symeon Papadopoulos is a Principal Researcher with the Information Technologies Institute-Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece, and part of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Lab (MKLab). He is currently leading the MeVer group, a team of approximately 30 researchers and engineers working in a number of projects at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Media, Multimedia Retrieval and Intelligent Network Analytics. In particular, he is conducting research on the topics of AI bias, online disinformation, media verification, and trend detection and forecasting using social media signals. He has been coordinating and leading a number of collaborative research and innovation projects and has co-authored more than 200 publications, served as TPC member in more than 50 conferences and is a regular reviewer in more than 20 journals. Since 2014, he is one of the co-founders of the Infalia Private Company, a spin-off company of CERTH.

Kalina Bontcheva leads a 20-strong research team at the Natural Language Processing Group at the University of Sheffield and a visiting Senior Researcher at the Big Data and Smart Society Institute in Bulgaria. She is also a member of Sheffield’s Center for Freedom of the Media. Between 2014 and 2016 Prof Bontcheva led the PHEME project, which was amongst the first EU projects to study computational methods for the detection and tracking of online disinformation. She was the scientific director of the WeVerify project under Horizon 2020 that ended in November 2021 and is now the scientific lead of the vera.ai project co-funded under Horizon Europe. Kalina is a member of the EDMO Advisory Council and is also actively involved in the Irish and Bulgarian-Romanian EDMO Hubs. She has co-authored over 200 peer reviewed publications, as well as policy-oriented reports including an ITU/UNESCO study, Balancing Act: Countering Digital Disinformation while Respecting Freedom of Expression; and two UNESCO policy briefs on Combating the Disinfodemic: Working for Truth in the Time of COVID-19.

Vasileios Mezaris is a Research Director with the Information Technologies Institute - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece. He is the Head of the Intelligent Digital Transformation Laboratory, where he leads a group of researchers working on multimedia understanding and artificial intelligence; in particular, on image and video analysis and annotation, machine learning and deep learning for multimedia understanding and big data analytics, explainable AI and green AI, multimedia indexing and retrieval, and applications of multimedia understanding and artificial intelligence. Dr. Mezaris has co-authored more than 40 papers in refereed journals, 20 book chapters, 200 papers in international conferences, and 3 patents. He has edited two books and several proceedings volumes; he serves as Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2020-present) and as Editorial Board Member for the International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (2024-present); served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2016-2020) and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2012-2015 and 2018-2022); and serves regularly as a reviewer for many international journals and conferences. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, Media Studies and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs, University of Amsterdam. He is author of Information Politics on the Web, Digital Methods (both MIT Press) as well as Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2nd edition). He is co-author with Tommaso Venturini of Digitalj Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity). He is editor (with Sabine Niederer) of The Politics of Social Media Manipulation, The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media: A Cross-platform Analysis as well as the forthcoming book, Content Moderation Across Social Media Platforms (all from Amsterdam University Press).