University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies Associate Professor Maria Haigh and undergraduate student Sharmin Islam have been selected for the Fall 2026 Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute (NMDSI) Student Research Scholars program to investigate how artificial intelligence systems respond to disinformation.
Haigh, who will serve as the project’s faculty mentor, and Islam, a student in UWM’s Bachelor of Science in Information Science and Technology program, will collaborate on the project, “The Debunk That Wasn’t: How AI Systems Reproduce Disinformation Narratives While Appearing to Correct Them.” The project will receive up to $2,500 in NMDSI funding to support Islam’s research during the fall semester.
The study explores an emerging question in the way people encounter and evaluate information online: When an AI system identifies a false claim as misinformation, does its response actually help dismantle the underlying narrative, or does it inadvertently reinforce the story behind the false claim?
As AI-generated summaries and conversational tools become an increasingly common starting point for online searches, people may encounter an AI-generated response before they ever reach the original source or a professional fact-check. Haigh and Islam will investigate what happens when those systems are asked to evaluate disinformation.
“Disinformation is built like a story, with a villain, a threatened community, and a call to act,” Haigh says. “A good correction should take that story apart. We suspect that AI corrections do the opposite, getting the facts right while leaving the story in place.”
Working together, Haigh and Islam will compare three types of responses to selected disinformation claims: the original claim, a professional fact-check and an AI-generated answer. They will evaluate each for elements of narrative structure and examine whether AI-generated corrections continue to reproduce elements of the original disinformation narrative even while accurately disputing its factual claims.
The project builds on Haigh’s research examining how disinformation functions as narrative and how the structure of a story can influence how people engage with and respond to information. For Islam, the project provides an opportunity to apply their information science and technology training to a timely question about the rapidly changing information environment.
The NMDSI Student Scholars program supports student engagement in data science and related research while encouraging students to explore how data science can be applied across disciplinary fields. The program provides funding for students to work alongside faculty mentors on research projects and gives students opportunities to share their findings with academic, industry and community audiences.