Dr. Holly Walters: It's not harmless. It's not "just an innocent thing" to be fooled by AI. You NEED to be able to discern and differentiate reality. You NEED to know how the world works on a basic level. Because fooling you with baby animals and flowers is just the start of something much worse.

It's not harmless. It's not "just an innocent thing" to be fooled by AI. You NEED to be able to discern and differentiate reality. You NEED to know how the world works on a basic level. Because fooling you with baby animals and flowers is just the start of something much worse.

Wow. This post got some attention, didn't it?

Attention is all you need

Like another hole in the head.

Yep. Critical thinking is a much-needed skill. Schools don't teach it. I used to have to apply it to a flood of television commercials, so I have already developed those brain muscles. How can we help each other do that now?

Crash course have a good course on media literacy youtube.com/playlist?lis... Probably a good place to start for a lot of people, young and old

Media Literacyyoutube.com In 12 episodes, Jay Smooth teaches you Media Literacy! Based on an introductory college level curriculum, this series takes you through the history and psych...

Good. But its a muscle that needs to be exercised.

Yep. A good start point, but definitely not an end point. As with most things, practice helps a lot

Thank you!

Critical thinking requires knowledge to work with. A person who doesn’t know what a baby bald eagle looks like, or doesn’t know that baby birds often don’t resemble mini adult birds, likely wouldn’t recognize the left image as fake. Critical thinking skills cannot be separated from knowledge.

Of course, even if someone lacks knowledge on a particular subject, there can be other ways to tell if a source is not reliable. But this again requires knowledge. Obviously people can’t learn everything about every subject, but a broad, general base of knowledge will help many.

It's true that knowledge helps, but I'm talking about something different: the ability to question what we're presented with. Who's presenting it? What do they gain from our acceptance? What do they lose from our rejection? To whom else are they presenting it? Have they ever contradicted it? So on.

True. Perhaps the issue is that a lot of people don’t think that a random social media page has any reason to lie about what a baby eagle looks like, or post a fake picture of a fancy cake or dress. So they don’t think to question it.

I think that's exactly it. It would be considered mental illness to feel like you have to fact check every single thing you see, hear, or read, but we're building a society where you almost have to do that to cling to the truth. Even then what's the bus of the fact checkers?

In this particular case I wouldn't have bothered to question it either. If I stopped to think I'd be suspicious but whether I'm fooled by this matters not even a little bit (I'm not even going to remember the picture) so I'm not going to apply any thought to it. FB should be pruning this shit tho

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... This is good. Ran a session on it with new teachers yesterday.

Verifiedpress.uchicago.edu An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds. The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump...

This is exactly the sort of help I want!

Schools *attempt* to teach it. It's getting harder every year

Just adding to the youtube series, there is a brief (3.5 hour) audiobook course available on audible called Fighting Misinformation. It's part of the plus catalogue so anyone who has a subscription can listen without using a credit.

Schools do teach critical thinking, at least in the UK. It's a fair chunk of the humanities curriculum, science, and English. And kids are pretty aware of the need to be sceptical of what they read online. I suspect adults are worse at it. We're busier, and we were taught that books were reliable.

So glad that this way of working is taught in the UK. I was being US-centric, alas. Thank you for the good news and correction!

Somebody once called our garden center looking for the kind of tree that bleeds in Game of Thrones. They didn't understand it wasn't real. Doesn't exist. I'm sure they called somebody else right after us.

In Star Trek IV the scenes at the fictional “Cetacean Center” were filmed at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s one of the best aquariums in the world, but it does not have humpback whales in captivity. No aquarium does. That didn’t stop people from showing up and demanding to see the whales.

And I wonder if the people who called your garden center were also calling pet stores to ask when they were getting baby dragons in.

I mean, sure, bearded dragons exist and make very nice pets, but I would not want to sell a living sentient animal to anyone that detached from reality.

Yeah, they don't have them because Kirk and Spock abducted them into the future. Duh.

It’s a great aquarium. I hope the people enjoyed it despite the lack of captive whales. (sometimes you can see wild whales in the distance from their back deck)

It’s one of my favorite places in the world

I finally got to visit a few years ago and it totally lives up to the hype. It’s one of the reasons I’m sad that I can’t afford to live in California, lol.

I was born near Monterey and lived in the area until I was about 10. I can’t count how many times I visited as a kid. I live halfway across the country now, but I can’t wait to visit again and take my kid.

Personally I'd put a walloping great markup on a Dracaena draco ("yes that's right, it's a Dragon's Blood Tree") but I imagine there are truth-in-advertising laws.

Technically if you cut a philodendren Dark Lord it does have like a reddish oxalative sap, but that's as close as you'll possibly get and they're not cheap to just go around slicing into just to watch them leak red sap.

Boy do people get salty when you harsh their buzz. Started with the crake chick is baby crow. Stolen images of cartoonish needle-felt animals asserted as real. Lamb/alpaca conflation. “But I WANT it to be real Y U SO MEAN?” Well, as they say, fuck your feelings.

Obviously AI images of old ladies with giant crochet projects. Current-year is not easy for people like me whose personal flavour of neurodivergent means that it's overwhelmingly important to them whether or not something is actually true.

I think those of us wired this way have our work laid out, and it SUCKS.

Thank you for describing my flavour! I can't even doomscroll Pinterest anymore, bc I don't know what is real or not and it makes me feel sick.

It's disturbing that people have such little sense of what animals and plants look like that they fall for this stuff. Pinterest has long been full of people asking where they can buy seeds for watermelons photoshopped electric blue or roses with rainbow petals. Touch grass, etc

A friend just fell for teal iris bulbs by some shady Chinese seller on Walmart site. No cultivar name, just photoshop or complete computer fabrication. 30 day guarantee! Honey, if those are alive at all, they gonna bloom purple in 12 months.

Most people live in cities now and many/most? rarely see true nature. In the next 20-30 years it's projected up to 70% of humans will live in cities, so even less people who've seen untouched nature.

I live in DC and go birding in parks within the district at least once a week! The opportunities are there but people are rarely encouraged to look.

I have lived in cities, burbs, country. I have bad news about how incurious and jammed with untrue lore about nature my rural neighbors are. And good news about how accessible bits of nature can be to urbanites. Engaging honestly with the natural world, or not, is a choice available to all.

It even starts below that with 'funny' animal videos where the animals are either clearly in distress or have behavior problems or even illnesses that are seen as 'cool' or 'cute' and outright ignore if you point it out.

I think the morons who make and post the vids of hypoxic bulldogs, mentally ill lone goats, children ‘bout to get bit, genuinely *believe* it’s cute and harmless, and share their own stupid. The fakes-as-real are presented malevolently, to make others more stupid.

Couple days ago on FB I saw a "photo" of a puppy cuddling with a baby. 125K+ reactions and hundreds of adoring comments. Almost nobody noticed the waxy skin textures or six fingers. We are absolutely ushering in a whole new level of gullibility.

I would argue that we're just noticing our education system's abject failure at creating evidence-based critical thinking. This is emphatically not a new problem. See how there haven't been a useful number of right wing scientists for decades? www.pewresearch.org/politics/200...

Section 4: Scientists, Politics and Religionwww.pewresearch.org Politics and science have become entangled on numerous occasions over the past several years. Conservatives have grown increasingly skeptical of the

there's a Moana 2 trailer on youtube with loads of AI interspersed among the real clips, and i'll be honest it threw me the first time i watched it. the kid (10) spotted it straight away, so i need to be more alert to this

Yeah, any youtube trailer these days is fake unless it comes directly from its creator..... It's lame clickbait and it works and they get paid for doing it Profiting offa misinformation 😮‍💨 But yeah, the bright side is every generation grows up with the new tech and can spot it faster

"You NEED to be able to discern and differentiate reality. You NEED to know how the world works on a basic level." All of this. But too many of us are lacking this skill, and I really have no idea how we can fix it. But we have to try.

It's not really a skill. It's about having reliable sources of information. Any reliance on an ability to discern false information directly is a fools errand.

Better education. Even without AI images many can't differentiate factual from fictional in prose! Though when people have lied about many things like diet ( corprate greed & religious beliefs) history (because they want to forget it happened) & the rest it shows we've let manipulators fuck us.

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