Abstract

Although disinformation has long been used to manipulate the political debate (e.g., the American Founding Fathers are now known to have spread disinformation to attack their opponents), it has gained particular attention recently, especially in the political domain. In the face of the recent technological developments, disinformationists have been offered sophisticated tools to spread disinformation quickly and more efficiently, while challenging mainstream media and spreading chaos. Consequently, the world has been dwelling with a (dis)information crisis, which cannot be dissociated from a more in-depth Democracy crisis. As democratic systems build upon the principles of free speech, little attention is paid to control mechanisms over the extended democratisation of information and knowledge sources, which enables disinformationists, typically akin to authoritarian regimes, to take advantage of that freedom. The known use of social media for spreading disinformation is now accompanied by sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) tools [Sousa-Silva, R. (2024). Fighting Cyber-malice: A Forensic Linguistics Approach to Detecting AI-generated Malicious Texts. In R. Mitkov, S. Ezzini, C. Acarturk, T. Ranasinghe, P. Rayson, M. El-Haj, I. Ezeani, M. Bradbury, & N. Khallaf (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (NLPAICS’2024) (pp. 164−174)]. This context encourages the disinformation crisis, which is likely to increase in the future. Since large language models and generative AI operate as black boxes, not only is it impossible to control their output, but also an efficient use of prompt engineering enables users to produce disinformation instantaneously and massively. This presentation discusses disinformation in the age of permacrisis. It argues that contemporary disinformation takes on a cross-border threatening nature that has the potential to instigate an environment of lawlessness (and eventually further the Democracy crises) and concludes by showing how linguistic analysis has the potential to counter this progression.