AI Resources for Educators : Disinformation & Misinformation and AI

How the existence of such AI video editors puts a heavy burden on consumers of information to prove what's real. From the article: "Even the fact that this exists makes it easier to spread misinformation because of this thing called the liar’s dividend, where even if a video is real and you have no reason to suspect otherwise, you still kind of have to question if it’s real."

"Experts in artificial intelligence have long warned that AI-generated content could muddy the waters of perceived reality. Weeks into a pivotal election year, AI confusion is on the rise.

Politicians around the globe have been swatting away potentially damning pieces of evidence — grainy video footage of hotel trysts, voice recordings criticizing political opponents — by dismissing them as AI-generated fakes. At the same time, AI deepfakes are being used to spread misinformation."

"Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have made it easy to generate believable audio, allowing anyone from foreign actors to music fans to copy somebody’s voice — leading to a flood of faked content on the web, sowing discord, confusion and anger."

"The two broadcasters, purportedly anchors for a news outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. They are computer-generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known instance of “deepfake” video technology being used to create fictitious people as part of a state-aligned information campaign."

"Just as Mr. Howard hoped that his daughter would learn not to trust everything she read on the internet, he hoped society would learn the same lesson.

“You could program millions of these bots to appear like humans, having conversations designed to convince people of a particular point of view” he said. “I have warned about this for years. Now it is obvious that this is just waiting to happen.”"

Google said it was scaling down the use of AI-generated answers in some search results, after the tech made high-profile errors including telling users to put glue on their pizza and saying Barack Obama was Muslim.

"Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental "AI Overviews" tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use "non-toxic glue". The search engine's AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day. A Google spokesperson told the BBC they were "isolated examples". Some of the answers appeared to be based on Reddit comments or articles written by satirical site, The Onion."

"Here are some of the quirkiest AI hallucination examples and unexpected results we have found while working with AI-generated images and text, along with explanations of the possible reasons behind these hallucinations."

"A lawyer is in trouble after admitting he used ChatGPT to help write court filings that cited six nonexistent cases invented by the artificial intelligence tool."

"Former President Donald Trump getting gang-tackled by riot-gear-clad New York City police officers. Russian President Vladimir Putin in prison grays behind the bars of a dimly lit concrete cell....But neither visual is remotely real. The images — and scores of variations littering social media — were produced using increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible image generators powered by artificial intelligence.
Misinformation experts warn the images are harbingers of a new reality: waves of fake photos and videos flooding social media after major news events and further muddying fact and fiction at crucial times for society.

View this one page PDF to learn the 5 types of misinformation and the difference between misinformation and disinformation.

This is a landing page about AI, misinformation and disinformation from the News Literacy Project. There are links at the bottom to very useful resources that you can use in the classroom.