Alan H. MacDonald Information Science Public Lecture: How Generative AI Fuels Disinformation and Misinformation and What We Must Do

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:00:00 GMT

Open to all.

The flood of disinformation and misinformation flowing through social media today is a widespread societal concern. Artificial Intelligence is making the problem worse. What to do? In the Alan H. MacDonald Information Science Public Lecture, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, one of Canada’s leading social media scholars, will offer insights on how students, faculty, and the public can develop resilience to address this growing concern.

Social platforms now algorithmically remix news, memes, and AI generated content, blurring the line between fact and fiction, and obscuring traditional credibility cues (e.g., source reputation, visual authenticity, consensus). According to a new report, The State of Generative AI Use in Canada 2025, from the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, 59 percent of Internet users distrust political news online because it may be fake or manipulated, with two-thirds fearing that generative AI could sway elections. Yet paradoxically, students and faculty are embracing these same generative AI tools for study and research support. This apparent disconnect between public concerns and uptake of these tools demands closer scrutiny. The talk will examine the features that enable the rapid adoption of generative AI tools by the public on the one hand, and how those same features allow bad actors to create and disseminate dis- and misinformation at scale on the other. The talk will conclude with a call for actionable research and policy focused on strengthening “epistemic resilience” among students, researchers, and the broader public through critical digital literacy, robust verification practices, and institutional safeguards that ensure the safe and ethical use of generative AI.

Speaker Biography: Anatoliy Gruzd is a Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management and the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. As a computational social science researcher, he investigates how social media affects the way people and organizations communicate, collaborate, and share information, including misinformation. His expertise lies in studying online communities and social networks, as well as in developing new computational methods and tools to analyze public discourse across various domains. Most recently, he has been examining the spread of pro-Kremlin narratives, propaganda and disinformation related to the Russia-Ukraine war. Anatoliy’s innovative approach to studying social media has led him to be named a Canada Research Chair in 2015 and inducted into the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2017.

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Alan H. MacDonald Information Science Public Lecture: How Generative AI Fuels Disinformation and Misinformation and What We Must Do