Irish Examiner view: Dangerous misinformation in a post-truth era

Story about a cancer patient who became severely malnourished while following the advice of a 'wellness guru' should give us all pause

Niamh Griffin's recent article about the perils of following the health advice of influencers quoted a statistic that the 'wellness' industry is worth $6.3tn. Picture: iStock

It’s easy, indeed, understandable, to think of misinformation in a political sense, even if there it is frequently blended and bound to the more deliberate act of disinformation.

The first coming of Donald Trump, with its extraordinary hostility to facts, heralded the onset of what has been termed the post-truth era. It has only been made worse with his second coming, where there no longer seems to be even a semblance of spin and the administration appears to lie with every statement, appearance, or breath.

There is a difference between misinformation and disinformation, though it’s often obscured. You can spread incorrect information without realising it (misinformation), and that information may have been deliberately crafted to be deceptive (disinformation).

Yet while disinformation can have sweeping, even catastrophic political consequences, misinformation can also have a devastating impact on individuals.

As reported by Niamh Griffin last week, a cancer patient in his 60s lost 20% of his body weight and became severely malnourished while following the advice of a wellness guru. 

This included supplying a blood sample and being told he was allergic to potatoes, gluten, dairy, caffeine, cashew nuts, peas, beer, and wine. He was also urged to take supplements costing €530. 

It’s a classic hustle — “I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with you and oh, by the way, I have the cure”.

Online, anybody can claim expertise in, well, anything. Just because somebody has “doctor” in their social media handle doesn’t mean they have any medical background.

In the age of Grokipedia, AI slop, and seemingly endless hustles and scams online, a single piece of misinformation can be magnified, shared, and consumed more easily than ever before. It’s the ordinary person who’s left dealing with the consequences.

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AI facilitates rise in online scams

Once upon a time, there were snake oil salesman hawking nonsense cures for everything, and once upon a time before that there was a roaring trade in body parts marketed as saint’s relics. One imagines that, at some stage, one of our Neanderthal kin was passing off deerskin as a bear pelt.

David McWilliams and Miriam O’Callaghan are among the prominent people whose faces and voices were used to create entirely fake fraudulent deepfake videos. File picture

No matter what the innovation or fashion, there’s always somebody who’ll try to dupe a person out of their hard-earned cash. So it should not be surprising that payments company Visa has found the average Irish person loses €125 to scams each year — and that AI is increasingly driving some of these, alongside more traditional forms of fraudulent activity.

Those of us who find ourselves terminally online will likely have encountered at least one video ad purporting to be a prominent public figure urging viewers to take part in something that sounds too good to be true.

David McWilliams is one of the unfortunates who has had his face and voice duplicated for such nefarious purposes, and the truth is that it’s only likely to get worse.

Denmark, in a forward-thinking move, is changing its laws to give citizens copyright over their image and voice as a way of tackling this. Irish legislation could do with catching up.

There are people who have lost thousands to a variety of scams, from romance to bank detail theft, and we should
remember that at the heart of every fraud story is a human being whose trust and finances have both been pilfered.

Technology is only making it easier, with the authorities often left playing catch up.

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An open mind on nuclear energy

Given the staunchly anti-nuclear stance of this country — the technology is banned under legislation from 1999 — it may have seemed jarring to see the head of Bord Gáis Energy, David Kirwan, asking: “Can you afford not to look at nuclear?” It’s a relevant question, given that our energy network has limited extra capacity, despite the relentless need for additional housing as well as industry.

Yet there is merit to opposing nuclear power, given our people’s history with helping those still suffering the legacy effects of the Chernobyl explosion.

We have seen the damage from Fukushima, and there remains the problem of disposing of nuclear waste. We are, also, more familiar with nuclear power plants as huge things, but Kirwan’s point — and indeed a similar point was made by one of our letter contributors last week — is that there now exist small reactors that require just a few hundred metres to be built and operated, as opposed to vast sites. These, he says, can also be decommissioned quickly in emergencies.

The demand for energy from data centres, driven by tech firms’ obsession with cramming AI into every orifice of our waking (and sleeping) lives, is almost insatiable, and increases in renewable production are immediately absorbed just meeting that demand.

So it’s no wonder that some of the US tech giants have signed contracts for nuclear reactors, or that hydrogen is being increasingly touted as a possible answer, even if that technology still needs to be deployed at scale.

We are not calling for a change in energy policy. However, we should at least be open to the discussion.

India is turning to mini reactors to power its data centres, while Morocco has unveiled plans for data centres powered completely by renewables.

Of course, AI technology will have to survive the increasing signs of an economic bubble first. Pioneer company OpenAI continues to lose far more money than it brings in, with astronomical sums committed to new data centres and no obvious indication that it will suddenly be able to pay its way. And data centres are under such pressure now that their lifespans are shortening, requiring continuous massive investment just to keep the lights on.

It would be a fine use of the AI tech if it were deployed to make these centres more energy efficient, or if an idea floated by Google to build them in space (abundant solar power, cooler temperatures, no land issues) came to anything beyond an idea.

Still, if we don’t at least thrash out the pros and cons of revamping our struggling energy policy, we’ll never know what we could have in our arsenal.