ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A TOOL FOR COUNTERACTING THE INFODEMIC: AN ANALYSIS OF ITS APPLICATION IN MEDIA PRACTICE

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global international health crisis, which in turn caused an infodemic, i.e., a rapid spread of misinformation. The acute societal need for timely, relevant, and reliable coverage of events led to the realization of the inadequacy of traditional journalistic tools and the necessity for their modernization. Faced with the infodemic, the media had to restructure editorial work, involving staff in the use of innovative methods for deep fact-checking and media content creation, including the use of artificial intelligence. This article examines the key issues in society and the information space caused by the infodemic, as well as the role of AI in addressing them. The focus is on analyzing successful cases of neural network applications in journalistic practice in Russia and abroad.