When Camille François, a longstanding professional on disinformation, sent an e mail to her team late previous calendar year, a lot of had been perplexed.
Her message commenced by increasing some seemingly legitimate worries: that online disinformation — the deliberate spreading of untrue narratives commonly created to sow mayhem — “could get out of manage and come to be a enormous threat to democratic norms”. But the textual content from the main innovation officer at social media intelligence group Graphika soon became relatively far more wacky. Disinformation, it study, is the “grey goo of the internet”, a reference to a nightmarish, stop-of-the entire world situation in molecular nanotechnology. The alternative the e mail proposed was to make a “holographic holographic hologram”.
The strange e mail was not truly penned by François, but by laptop code she had created the message — from her basement — utilizing textual content-building artificial intelligence