How does misinformation spread through AI systems?

The misinformation pathway is mechanical. A poorly-sourced claim appears somewhere on the web. An AI engine summarizes that page in response to a user query. The summary, stripped of its original caveats, gets republished or quoted on another site. A second engine retrieves the republished version, which now looks like an independent source, and synthesizes it into its own response. Within a few cycles, a single weakly-sourced claim is appearing in multiple engines, each citing a different downstream source for the same wrong fact. The repair work is unglamorous: identify the original contaminated source, identify the downstream rebroadcasts, work at the strongest source we can move (often Wikipedia or a Reuters-tier outlet), and track AIQ™ weekly until the engines re-weight away from the contaminated chain.