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My name is Lee Hawkins.

I've been a journalist for over 25 years. On my new podcast, What Happened in Alabama, I investigate my family history, my upbringing in Minnesota, and my father's painful nightmares about growing up in Alabama.

What happened in Alabama is a new series confronting the cycles of trauma

for myself, my family, and for many black Americans. of

my family and for many black Americans. Listen now.

Stephen, how would you describe the sheer scope of this problem?

It's become literally a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation to the point where

it's so disorienting that people just have no idea what to believe or who to believe or even

whether to believe their own eyes because their own eyes could be showing them a deep fake.

There are now more than a thousand websites pretending to be news sites that are just

pumped out by generative AI, which basically takes the cesspool of misinformation and

disinformation that we've been living in for several years and

threatens to become a force multiplier for all of that.

That is Stephen Brill, the acclaimed journalist and founder of brands like the American

...