Finding information online used to follow a familiar pattern: type a question into a search engine, open several websites, compare what they say, and decide which source seems trustworthy.
Artificial intelligence is changing that process.
Today, AI systems can summarize webpages, answer questions conversationally, recommend content, translate information, generate articles, create realistic images, and even imitate human voices.
This makes online information faster and easier to access, but it also creates new questions about accuracy, authenticity, and trust.
Understanding how artificial intelligence is changing online information is therefore becoming an important part of media and information literacy.
The Reuters Institute reported in 2025 that information-seeking had become the most common use of generative AI among surveyed users, with 24% reporting weekly use for that purpose.
AI can be incredibly useful. But it can also confidently produce incorrect information, generate convincing synthetic media, and make it harder to distinguish between original evidence and computer-generated material.
The challenge is learning how to use these tools without switching off your critical thinking.
AI Is Changing How People Search for Information
Traditional search engines usually provide a list of links.
AI-powered search can go one step further by creating a direct summary or conversational answer.
Google’s AI Overviews, for example, can generate a snapshot of information from multiple sources and provide links for further exploration.
Google also warns that these AI-generated responses can make mistakes and recommends checking important information in more than one place.
This changes user behavior.
Instead of opening five articles about a topic, someone might read one AI-generated summary and move on.
That is convenient when you need a quick explanation such as:
“What causes a solar eclipse?”
But it becomes riskier when the question involves medicine, law, finance, breaking news, or another subject where small inaccuracies can matter.
AI summaries should therefore be treated as useful starting points rather than automatic final authorities.
Follow the links.
Check the original evidence.
Ask where important numbers and claims came from.
The easier information becomes to consume, the more important source-checking becomes.
AI Chatbots Are Becoming Information Gateways
AI chatbots are also changing the way people interact with information.
Instead of searching keywords such as:
best ways improve sleep adults
users can ask:
“What are some evidence-based ways to improve sleep if I work irregular hours?”
The conversation can continue with follow-up questions.
That makes information retrieval feel much more natural.
Reuters Institute research found that AI chatbots and interfaces were already becoming a source of news by 2025. Around 7% of respondents said they used them for news each week, rising to 15% among people under 25.
The advantage is obvious.
AI can simplify complicated topics, translate terminology, summarize long documents, and help users explore questions they might struggle to phrase in a traditional search engine.
However, conversational confidence can create a problem.
An AI response can sound polished even when it is wrong.
People therefore need to distinguish between fluency and accuracy.
A clear answer is not automatically a correct answer.
AI Can Generate Huge Amounts of Online Content
Artificial intelligence is no longer only helping people find information.
It can create it.
Generative AI tools can produce blog posts, social media captions, product descriptions, emails, summaries, illustrations, music, videos, and computer-generated voices in seconds.
This dramatically lowers the cost of content creation.
A small business can create marketing material more quickly. A student can use AI to brainstorm ideas. A creator can translate an article into several languages.
But the same efficiency can be used to flood websites and social platforms with low-quality or misleading material.
Someone can generate dozens of convincing articles without conducting original research.
The writing might contain professional language, statistics, expert-sounding quotations, and detailed explanations while still including invented information.
UNESCO warns that AI can produce highly convincing headlines, images, voices, and written material, making media literacy increasingly important when judging online content.
This means appearance is becoming an even weaker signal of reliability.
Professional-looking content may have been created in seconds.
Readers increasingly need to ask not just “Does this look credible?” but “What evidence supports it?”
AI Hallucinations Create a New Accuracy Problem
One major limitation of generative AI is often described as hallucination or confabulation.
This happens when an AI system generates information that sounds plausible but is false.
It might invent a book title.
Create a fake quotation.
Provide a nonexistent academic reference.
Confidently give the wrong date.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology describes confabulation as generative AI producing and confidently presenting erroneous or false content.
NIST notes that fabricated citations and explanations can make incorrect answers appear more trustworthy than they really are.
Consider asking an AI system:
“Give me five academic studies proving this claim.”
You might receive beautifully formatted references.
But unless you check them, you do not know whether those papers actually exist or whether they say what the AI claims.
A safer habit is to treat AI-generated references like leads.
Search the title.
Find the original paper.
Check the authors.
Confirm the quotation or statistic.
AI can accelerate research, but verification still belongs to the user.
Synthetic Images and Deepfakes Complicate Visual Evidence
For many years, seeing a photograph or video felt like strong evidence that something happened.
That assumption is becoming less reliable.
Generative AI can now create synthetic images, audio, and video that resemble real people and events.
Deepfakes can imitate a person’s appearance or voice convincingly enough to mislead viewers.
UNESCO describes synthetic media as AI-created audio, images, or video and warns that highly realistic deepfakes can make it harder for people to determine what is authentic.
Imagine a video showing a famous CEO apparently announcing that their company is bankrupt.
If convincing enough, the video could spread widely before journalists or the company confirm that it is fake.
The opposite problem can happen too.
Real recordings may be dismissed as AI-generated simply because synthetic media exists.
Visual verification therefore requires more than staring at an image looking for strange hands or unnatural shadows.
Check who first published it.
Search for independent reporting.
Use reverse image search.
Look for original footage and contextual evidence.
When available, check information about the media’s provenance.
Content Provenance May Become More Important
As synthetic media becomes common, technology is also being developed to help people understand where digital content came from.
One important approach is content provenance.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA, develops an open technical standard known through the user-facing concept of Content Credentials.
These credentials can provide tamper-evident information about a digital asset’s history, such as how it was created or edited.
Think of it somewhat like a history record attached to digital media.
Instead of asking only:
“Does this photograph look real?”
you may be able to examine information showing where it originated and what changes were made.
However, provenance is not a magical truth detector.
A lack of Content Credentials does not automatically mean an image is fake, and having provenance information does not prove that every claim associated with the content is true.
NIST similarly identifies provenance, labeling, watermarking, and synthetic-content detection as important approaches for improving transparency around AI-generated media.
The goal is to provide more evidence for evaluation.
AI Is Also Changing News and Journalism
Newsrooms are experimenting with AI for transcription, translation, summarization, data analysis, recommendations, and other repetitive tasks.
Used carefully, these tools can help journalists work faster.
For example, AI could translate an interview or summarize a long public document before a journalist checks the important details.
Audiences also show some interest in these uses.
Reuters Institute research found support among some users for AI applications such as summarizing news, translating stories, recommending relevant articles, and allowing people to ask questions about news.
At the same time, respondents generally preferred situations where humans remained involved.
That human involvement matters.
Journalism involves more than producing sentences.
Reporters verify sources, interview people, investigate documents, consider context, correct mistakes, and make editorial judgments.
AI can support those processes.
It should not automatically replace them.
For readers, the useful question becomes:
Was AI used as an assistant, or was unverified AI output treated as reporting?
Transparency from publishers will become increasingly important.
AI Can Make Information More Accessible
The changes are not only risky.
AI can improve access to information in several meaningful ways.
Long reports can be summarized into simpler explanations.
Complex technical language can be rewritten for beginners.
Information can be translated into different languages.
People can ask follow-up questions rather than struggling through unfamiliar terminology.
Someone reading a difficult economics report, for example, might ask an AI assistant to explain inflation in everyday language before returning to the original source.
This can lower barriers to learning.
The important distinction is between using AI to understand a source and using AI as a substitute for the source.
If an AI summary says a scientific study found something surprising, open the study.
If an AI explanation describes a new law, check the official legislation or authoritative legal guidance.
AI becomes most useful when it helps you reach reliable information rather than replacing your need to inspect it.
How to Evaluate Information in an AI-Driven Internet
The basic rules of information literacy still work.
They simply matter more.
Ask who originally created the information.
Look for evidence.
Check the publication date.
Compare independent sources.
Verify important quotations and statistics.
If an AI-generated answer provides references, open them rather than assuming they are correct.
When viewing suspicious images or videos, investigate their original source and surrounding context.
For high-stakes information involving health, legal rights, safety, or money, rely on appropriate authoritative or professional sources.
UNESCO continues to emphasize media and information literacy as an important response to misinformation, harmful digital content, and the changing online information environment.
AI may change the tools we use.
It does not eliminate the need to ask:
“How do I know this is true?”
Artificial intelligence is changing online information at almost every stage. It can help people search, summarize, translate, personalize, and create content faster than ever before.
At the same time, AI hallucinations, synthetic media, deepfakes, and automated content production create new challenges for accuracy and trust.
The answer is not to reject AI-generated information completely.
Use AI for exploration, explanation, brainstorming, and discovery-but keep important evidence connected to original, trustworthy sources.
When an AI answer makes an important claim, verify it. When an extraordinary image appears online, investigate its origin. When a citation is provided, check that it actually exists.
AI can make information easier to produce and easier to access.
Your critical thinking is what makes that information useful.