The AI Disinformation Incident Repository with Sam Stockwell and Broderick McDonald

What this episode covers

EPISODE DESCRIPTION - Ready to publish AI disinformation is no longer just about deepfakes. It is now about poisoned search results, chatbot hallucinations, meme-driven propaganda, and a fast-growing economy built to exploit chaos. Sam Stockwell and Broderick McDonald unpack the new playbook - and why the next information war may be won before the truth even has a chance to catch up. Together, they break down the AI Disinformation Incident Repository, an open dataset tracking real-world cases where AI is used to manipulate information during terrorist attacks, riots, wars, and other crisis events. Sam explains how the repository works, why incidents are increasing, and how journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers are documenting the spread of synthetic images, edited footage, and AI-generated claims in real time. Broderick widens the lens, arguing that the real threat is an epistemic crisis - one that reaches beyond deepfakes into the training data, retrieval pipelines, and systems people rely on to decide what is true. You'll discover: Why AI-generated misinformation does not need to be believable to be effective How false content can go viral at 3x the rate of manual disinformation Why crisis moments like Southport, Belfast, and the Iran conflict create perfect conditions for manipulation How foreign-linked, domestic, and financially motivated actors now overlap Why "shadow influencers" are turning outrage into income How chatbots can be poisoned by fake or misleading source material Why transparency around model weighting and data hygiene matters now more than ever The conversation also explores how state and non-state actors are using AI to flood the information environment with content designed for both human audiences and machine ingestion. From fake news articles meant to corrupt LLM outputs to AI-generated videos that do not need to look real in order to shape perception, this episode shows how the battle over truth has changed. If you care about national security, media literacy, AI safety, or simply understanding why it is getting harder to tell what is real online, this is essential listening. The tools are changing fast, the tactics are adapting even faster, and the consequences are reaching far beyond the feed.

Distinct summary based on available episode metadata or transcript content.