American voters may have dodged a bullet in the 2024 election, but the threat of AI-generated disinformation is far from over. According to Oren Etzioni, a renowned AI researcher and founder of nonprofit TrueMedia, the real danger lies in the "diversity of deepfakes" that fly under the radar, targeting specific groups and individuals beyond the mainstream press.

Etzioni notes that most people tend to think that their experience is representative of others, but in reality, there are countless disinformation campaigns that don't make it to the mainstream media. These hidden threats are often more dangerous than the ones that do, as they can't be easily identified or countered. TrueMedia offers a free service to identify images, video, audio, and other items as fake or real, but even this is no simple task and can't be completely automated.

The primary mission of TrueMedia is to quantify the problem of AI-generated disinformation in three key ways: how much is out there, how many people see it, and how much impact it has. While these questions are still difficult to answer, Etzioni predicts that we'll become more adept at measuring this over the next four years. The stakes are high, and the tech community must take action to address this hidden threat.