As Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology continues to advance, concerns are growing about its potential to be used for not-so-good purposes, such as creating and spreading fake news and disinformation.

One recent study about this can be found in a white paper written by the great Nico Dekens (aka Dutch_OsintGuy) "A Practical Guide for OSINT Investigators to Combat Disinformation and Fake Reviews Driven by AI (ChatGPT)" and released by ShadowDragon, one of the best-known companies in the world providing cyber investigative resources and training for use by private companies, intelligence gathering professionals, law enforcement, and government.

(ShadowDragon logo)

This paper highlights the use of AI in creating fake news and disinformation, and the need for greater vigilance and awareness around this issue.

There are other exciting points, including analyzing a text for errors or patterns that are very much used by AI and for which it is also possible to do targeted searches even through Google dorks, or the possibility of finding fake reviews or hate speech, which unfortunately are increasingly being used to polarize more and more users.
Finally, there is an intriguing part: I was touched by the paragraphs of the paper, which are fascinating about the new possibility of AI being able to generate fake voices and videos almost entirely indistinguishable from reality.

We often discussed this topic in our meetings at Digital Forensics, Osint conferences and articles, such as this one or this one.

However, on this point, we know that the shady side of things often makes the most noise, but that would not be fair, at least for the style of storytelling that has always distinguished us.

We cannot avoid considering the use of AI in science in general and in helping scientific research in particular, in areas where we already have vast amounts of datasets and case studies (such as in medicine or astrophysics to give just a couple of examples) and which it is a bit more complex for us humans to analyze and keep in mind in their entirety.

I like to mention the other side of AI, the one whereby many people have been allowed to generate even good quality content, certainly not comparable to what a real artist with years of experience and with his abstract thinking could generate, that I think could hardly be replaced, but still offering to an enormous mass of users a new plethora of services previously precluded to a few professionals, minimizing the waste of time and perhaps even money.

(Yin and Yang: technologically revisited by AI)

In this regard, because the topic is of extreme interest to those of us who are passionate about this subject, we thought of doing a complete AI-style redesign of our blog, as we took advantage of the capabilities of the new technology to generate all the images for the new homepage representing our Project.

We also created a new logo, this time conceived by us but created by professionals, which, as explained on the project page, sees a stylized eye represented, therefore highlighting the fundamental theme of Open Source Intelligence. On either side, however, you can see two trails representing our mission to share knowledge as we have learned it over the years to give back to the community.

(New OsintOps logo)

Please occasionally take a look at our main page and our blog. We are preparing a series of activities that we hope you will find interesting :)

Finally, I would like to make it clear that, without wishing to make any judgments about the use of technology, we are grateful to all those who strive to make good use of it, and I leave here a quote taken from a movie that I think everyone knows:

"We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are."