Reality and fact are being rapidly undermined by fake news, manipulated photos and films and now even voice manipulation, photoshopping for voice, like Adobe's Voco project which allows you to make people say things they never actually said. It's getting increasingly difficult to check the validity of a news item, especially when it confirms your own opinions, and this presents an enormous challenge for all educators. What happens when there's more fake news than real news? Whose news do you believe? Instead of creating a global meeting place to promote democracy and freedom the internet is now allowing us to create many parallel worlds where totally different perceptions and ideologies exist side by side but almost invisible to each other. The real world is complex, often full of contradictions and grey zones, and there are seldom clear-cut answers. So much easier to turn your back on all that and retreat into a simplistic ideology full of sweeping generalisations and quick solutions, backed up by mountains of fake evidence.
Source criticism is getting harder every week and a rather chilling new challenge is presented in an article in Business Insider, Researchers taught AI to write totally believable fake reviews, and the implications are terrifying. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a wealth of exciting new opportunities but can equally be used to undermine society if it comes into the wrong hands. New research by Ben Y. Zhao and colleagues at the University of Chicago, Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems, has examined the use of AI to automatically generate fake reviews of hotels and restaurants. As AI develops, these fake reviews become almost impossible to spot and if produced on a massive scale could completely undermine the credibility of crowd-sourced guides like Yelp, Amazon or TripAdvisor. If we know that most reviews are manipulated or fake then they all become worthless. This may not seem so big if it is only about comments on discussion threads or review sites but the risk is that this will quickly spread to other fields. As Zhao claims in the BI article:
"In general, the threat is bigger. I think the threat towards society at large and really disillusioned users and to shake our belief in what is real and what is not, I think that's going to be even more fundamental," Zhao said. "So we're starting with online reviews. Can you trust what so-and-so said about a restaurant or product? But it is going to progress.
"It is going to progress to greater attacks, where entire articles written on a blog may be completely autonomously generated along some theme by a robot, and then you really have to think about where does information come from, how can you verify ... that I think is going to be a much bigger challenge for all of us in the years ahead."
Reality is in danger of becoming completely subjective and the challenge for education is how to equip our pupils and students to deal with this fragmented world.
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