MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski ‘Heartbroken’ By Unsettling Report on the Ill Effect of AI and Misinformation on Gen Z Voters

AI and misinformation are expected to play a significant role in the 2024 election cycle, and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski was visibly unsettled by a new report that showed just how much they affect America’s youngest voters.

NBC News correspondent Morgan Radford presented a report on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that featured a group of Gen Z voters trying to identify real coverage and fake, AI-generated coverage. Radford cited a 2023 YouGov survey that found that voters under 30 had the most difficult time distinguishing between what was real and what wasn’t. The community college students didn’t even seem to have confidence in their ability to tell the difference, one of them saying that “it’s just so easy to create AI images and AI headlines.”

Radford pointed out to the students: “It almost feels like you all aren’t so worried about thinking that fake things are real, but instead when you see real things, you’re not actually sure if they aren’t fake.” They agreed.

When presented with a few images and asked to identify them as real or fake, the students did well and were able to tell the difference; it even appeared that they knew what kinds of details to look for in case something was AI-generated (“AI tends to really mess up words,” “The guy in the back, his face is like very distorted”). But when it came to how it would affect their ability to cast an informed vote in the fall, their confidence was lacking.

One student said: “It makes it a lot harder to think about voting because you have to do a lot of extra work to find out if the things you’re seeing are real.” Another said: “There’s definitely times where I’ll be thinking, why bother if I cannot tell any sort of difference between between … true and false.”

That sentiment was followed by Brzezinski’s reaction: “I’m heartbroken.”

Watch the video above via MSNBC.

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