The Verification Crisis: Expert Perceptions of GenAI Disinformation and the Case for Reproducible Provenance

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Loth, Alexander, Kappes, Martin, Pahl, Marc-Oliver
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Loth, Alexander
Kappes, Martin
Pahl, Marc-Oliver
author_facet Loth, Alexander
Kappes, Martin
Pahl, Marc-Oliver
contents The growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has shifted disinformation production from manual fabrication to automated, large-scale manipulation. This article presents findings from the first wave of a longitudinal expert perception survey (N=21) involving AI researchers, policymakers, and disinformation specialists. It examines the perceived severity of multimodal threats -- text, image, audio, and video -- and evaluates current mitigation strategies. Results indicate that while deepfake video presents immediate "shock" value, large-scale text generation poses a systemic risk of "epistemic fragmentation" and "synthetic consensus," particularly in the political domain. The survey reveals skepticism about technical detection tools, with experts favoring provenance standards and regulatory frameworks despite implementation barriers. GenAI disinformation research requires reproducible methods. The current challenge is measurement: without standardized benchmarks and reproducibility checklists, tracking or countering synthetic media remains difficult. We propose treating information integrity as an infrastructure with rigor in data provenance and methodological reproducibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02100
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Verification Crisis: Expert Perceptions of GenAI Disinformation and the Case for Reproducible Provenance
Loth, Alexander
Kappes, Martin
Pahl, Marc-Oliver
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Social and Information Networks
I.2.0; K.4.1; K.4.2
The growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has shifted disinformation production from manual fabrication to automated, large-scale manipulation. This article presents findings from the first wave of a longitudinal expert perception survey (N=21) involving AI researchers, policymakers, and disinformation specialists. It examines the perceived severity of multimodal threats -- text, image, audio, and video -- and evaluates current mitigation strategies. Results indicate that while deepfake video presents immediate "shock" value, large-scale text generation poses a systemic risk of "epistemic fragmentation" and "synthetic consensus," particularly in the political domain. The survey reveals skepticism about technical detection tools, with experts favoring provenance standards and regulatory frameworks despite implementation barriers. GenAI disinformation research requires reproducible methods. The current challenge is measurement: without standardized benchmarks and reproducibility checklists, tracking or countering synthetic media remains difficult. We propose treating information integrity as an infrastructure with rigor in data provenance and methodological reproducibility.
title The Verification Crisis: Expert Perceptions of GenAI Disinformation and the Case for Reproducible Provenance
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Social and Information Networks
I.2.0; K.4.1; K.4.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02100