Nightmare fuel: Rapid-fire convincing disinformation without the data center

Nightmare fuel: Rapid-fire convincing disinformation without the data center

From Unspun by Amanda Sturgill

April 7, 2026 · 17 min

About this episode

This episode discusses the ease of creating disinformation and examines a paper on generating fake news without significant costs.

Welcome to Journal Club 6, which is about how it's gotten easy and inexpensive to make seemingly limitless disinformation ready to go straight into your feeds. Back in Roman times, it took control of the money mint to create and scale harmful propaganda. in this week's episode, Dr. Sturg looks at a paper that tested if it's possible to create convincing fake news without even having to pay for Chat GPT compute credits. The findings are not good news, but better to know. Find this week's paper here. And you can get better at finding fake news yourself with Dr. Sturg's book. Find it here or your favorite online bookseller. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Sturg

Topics covered

  • disinformation
  • fake news
  • media literacy
  • propaganda
  • education

Keywords

  • disinformation
  • fake news
  • Chat GPT
  • propaganda
  • media literacy
  • education
  • Journal Club

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Chat GPT

Books & works: Journal Club 6

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