John Wihbey in Big Think: AI vs. AI

“AI vs. AI: The upcoming arms race against disinformation online” by John Wihbey for Big Think is adapted from his new book, Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech — and What Comes Next (MIT Press, 2025).

The new era of generative AI constitutes an extraordinary moment given the growth of new technologies that, for the first time, are beginning to provide the kind of scale and supple understanding of human language and communication that could be adequate to the size of the problems on global platforms. These technologies remain flawed at present, but they are clearly rapidly improving in some cases. Some industry experts who have spent years tackling seemingly insurmountable problems are beginning to see real promise in using generative AI for content moderation.