FT Editor Roula Khalaf: AI Is Accelerating Misinformation Risks For Younger People

AI technology is accelerating the rise of harmful misinformation on social networks, risking younger people being unable to tell fact from fiction, Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf has said.

At a Fleet Street Quarter Festival of Words event supported by the News Media Association, Roula spoke about the rise of misinformation, highlighting the recent example of deepfakes of FT chief economics commentator Martin Wolf.

“We have taken this very, very seriously, it took a very long time, and after numerous requests, for Meta to put a stop to this,” she said. “We are very concerned about this, because this is using the FT’s most prominent voice as a scam, so some people would have lost money here.”

In discussion with Festival of Words director and former DCMS Minister Damian Collins, Roula said media education at school was “extremely important” to combat the risks to younger people from misinformation on social networks.

The conversation covered the rising threats to independent journalism in the United States during Donald Trump’s second term as president, and the extra precautions required in the newsroom.

“I was in our New York office a couple of weeks ago and I could sense that the journalists were anxious in a way that they’d never been before. I think it was reassuring for them to hear that we deal with issues like this [taking more safeguarding steps],” she told the audience in St Bride’s Church.

Damian added: “I think this is a new thing in democratic society to see governments attacking not just what journalists write, but their entire modus operandi.”

Roula, who recently interviewed OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, said AI technology had to be deployed with care in the newsroom, going on to emphasize the threat to creators posed by unchecked use of their content by AI firms.

Picture credit: FT/Mark Staniland