CSIR’s fight against AI misinformation moves beyond text
PRETORIA — The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is developing technology to search audio directly, without first converting speech into text, as it seeks partners to combat AI-driven misinformation. The work addresses a difficult gap in South Africa’s response to false content: analysing recordings across the country’s many languages.
The initiative forms part of a broader effort to help identify misleading material as increasingly convincing synthetic videos, images and audio complicate the task of verifying information. The CSIR and Government Communication and Information System convened a media roundtable on 28 October to examine those risks during elections.
Tools to support fact-checkers
According to the reported account of the discussion, CSIR principal AI specialist Avi Moodley called for partners to contribute data, infrastructure, resources and funding. She said organisations tackling misinformation needed a coordinated response to the volume of content being produced and circulated.
The CSIR’s Informed Fake News Advisor project compares information with credible sources and traces its origins, providing indicators for further investigation. It is intended primarily to support fact-checkers handling large volumes of material. A separate system under development would help prioritise content requiring urgent assessment.
These are investigative aids rather than automatic verdicts on whether a claim is true. Their practical value would be helping verification teams identify what needs attention first, particularly when misleading election content spreads faster than it can be checked.
Elections will test the technology
Moodley said the technologies remain under development, with the upcoming elections providing an opportunity to test and strengthen them before the next national vote. The audio-search work would extend that effort beyond the text-based analysis on which much current monitoring depends.
The roundtable’s announced participants included Africa Check, Media Monitoring Africa, the Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change and the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies. Their involvement brings research, verification and public communication into the same discussion, with the next challenge being to establish how reliably the tools perform on real election content.
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