Stonington ― Never fail to delete your voicemails after listening to them, because innocent phrases from your kids like “Hey mom” could be used by a hacker to send a message that impersonates your children’s voices.

This was one of the several practical tips handed out Thursday night during an “Under the Clocktower” talk about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence that attracted nearly 100 people to the United Church of Stonington. This is the first of a series of discussions the church is planning to hold.

Tim Love, a Stonington Borough resident and retired advertising executive whose 2022 book “Discovering Truth” looks at the many ways lies get spread on the internet, and Eric Feinberg, an online extremism expert from Washington, D.C., who serves as vice president of content moderation for the Coalition for a Safer Web, gave an hourlong talk on the dangers of AI and then fielded questions from the audience.

Love mused that many of his friends claim to be off social media, but then admit to using email.

“Email is social media,” Love said.

He also noted that baby boomers (generally in the 58 to 75 age range) who represented the large majority of Thursday’s audience, are seven times more likely to spread misinformation on the web than people under 30. Love said in a separate interview that he believes this is because many older news consumers grew up less critical about the information they received than people of younger generations.

Feinberg noted that voicemail is stored in iCloud, and therefore is accessible to hackers.

“Don’t post pictures of your kids and grandkids on social media,” he said, noting the prevalence of pedophiles on the internet. “Get off of it. It’s not important.”

Love also noted that while Russians and Chinese can no longer use American-made social media entities like Facebook and YouTube, Americans have no such protections against foreign actors. This has allowed the Russian government and others, he said, to attempt to interfere in our elections and sow divisions by posting incendiary content online.

“It’s a divide and conquer strategy,” he said.

And Feinberg, who says he has testified before Congress multiple times, noted that the legislature has essentially done nothing, though he gave credit to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., for trying.

Feinberg said his luck influencing social media outlets hasn’t been much better, and it’s worse now that most of them have made dramatic cuts to their content moderation teams.

He noted the case of Virginia TV journalist Alison Parker, who was killed along with her cameraman live on air. The murder video is still available on the internet, despite it supposedly being taken down many times by a variety of social media sites and despite the objections of advertisers whose ads are sometimes played alongside the clip.

He added that the internet is rife with criminal activity, including drug sales through social media sites.

Both Feinberg and Love blamed a provision in the 1996 Communications Act that essentially treats social media platforms as if they were telephone companies from the old landline era rather than the content providers they actually are. They said Section 230 of the law needs to be rescinded so that social media outlets accept liability for the content they provide.

That’s the only way they will be forced to shape up and be responsible for the content, they said.

As for AI, Feinberg was critical about its ability to separate fact from fiction. He noted that the AI program ChatGPT seemed unable to understand the idea of leap years until he taught it the rule that they coincide with presidential elections.

“It’s got a long way to go, but it’s only as good as what it is fed,” he said. “We’re literally the guinea pigs for it. ... AI can’t do critical thinking.”

Love, in a previous talk to a Connecticut College summer course via Zoom, cited the long history of communication innovations dating back to the Gutenberg press that have eventually led to a rethinking of the way society needs to deal with new information portals. During the Reformation, he said, it was Martin Luther questioning the authority of the Catholic Church to interpret the Bible, and now it is social media.

As a former advertising executive for the Omnicom Group who has lived internationally, Love said he believes advertisers could use their muscle to influence social media sites to do a better job at content moderation. Alternatively, he said a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers-type initiative could be used to pressure internet companies to take a hard look at their rules for acceptable content.

He likened today’s Wild West internet with the early days of magazines, radio and TV, when each of these media had a reckoning after falsehoods were exposed. In magazines, it was snake-oil salesmen and get-rich-quick schemes, while radio had its “War of the World” moment when Orson Welles did a fake news story about Martians invading New Jersey. TV had its “$64,000 Question” scandal when quiz-show answers were fed to contestants.

In each case, Love said, advertisers got together to make sure these new communication platforms set standards that provided a more reliable experience for customers, which in turn made people more trusting of the content and advertising they were receiving.

“They called this self-regulation, but it enabled you as a consumer to have a place to go,” he said. “If you felt you were harmed, you would go to the industry body.”

Today, he said, communications law for the internet “basically removes the platform from having any liability over the content. That's different than what the magazine industry had, the radio industry had and the television industry had. Because they could be held liable for the content.”

Originally, he said, regulators didn’t see the internet as an advertising platform. They were told it likely would make money off subscriptions, and internet platforms would operate on a “good Samaritan basis.”

But instead the internet has evolved into an advertising medium where everyone is competing for the most number of eyeballs, journalists included, Love said.

“That's why there's so much debate about this right now,” he said. “And it's affecting journalism. ... It's making it more difficult for journalists to weave this tight line between truth and entertainment.”

l.howard@theday.com