Long before the information explosion of the present times, a newspaper in the United States published a six-part series in August 1835 describing detailed sightings of living creatures on the moon supposedly seen through a newly discovered telescope by a fictitious astronomer. Later gaining notoriety as the ‘Great Moon Hoax’, the incident is usually considered as the first concerted misinformation campaign in the age of mass media and still remains as the classic example of what can go wrong if those controlling the media deliberately falsify and distort information either for disrupting society at large or gaining popularity at the expense of mass media ethics.
Moving forward to the present times when a click of a button and digital media algorithms dictate the reach and credibility of information, the issue of misinformation has attained importance not merely because of the reach and scope of media but also due to the potential harm such abuse can cause both to individuals and the society as a whole. With literacy evolving beyond the mere use of alphabets and numbers in everyday life, the penetrative scope of the electronic media, including social media and its ease of dissemination of information has established itself as a double-edged sword to modern lives. As a force multiplier in propagating vital information in a timely and economic manner, digital information platforms serve crucial roles such as lifesavers in natural calamities, health support systems during public health adversities, and even positively impact vital human endeavors such as education, sports, outreach activities and economic activities and trade.
While the potential for the abuse of the digital information platforms have been well understood and documented, with preventive laws in place, the contemporary craze for Artificial Intelligence as the governing platform of information propagation is developing into a destructive tool at the hands of the unscrupulous by not only simulating the real with the false but also influencing human beings into believing evidently incorrect information as true. In the hands of the unscrupulous, such AI managed tools can evolve into destructive weapons harming people in ways not anticipated before.
A classic contemporary malady is the pervasive damage caused through the ‘digital arrest’ phenomena which influences many to believe a blatant falsity as genuine and forces people to part with money for relief from a hazard that does not exist in the first place. Recognizing the ever-increasing potential for modern-day information to be abused in innovative and criminal ways, the United Nations have been actively propagating the abusive paradigms of information literacy, information misuse, social media abuse and AI generated falsities. Presently in its fourteenth campaign year, UNESCO hosts the Global Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Week in the last week of October.
With the theme “Navigating AI: Media and Information Literacy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, this year’s discussions will focus on the intersections of Media and Information Literacy and AI, and how AI is reshaping the information landscape given that MIL is crucial to empower individuals to critically engage with AI-driven content. While terms like ‘game-changing’ and disruptive’ have become watchwords in modern day digital information contexts in the age of AI, as educators we are not oblivious to the hype of paperless education, whiteboards and similar education fads. The utilities of such changes are hardly contested but what seems to have receded into the background is the ethical education that should drive digital information drives, acute and active awareness campaigns among stakeholders to decipher the true from the false and misleading, and active penal provisions to deter information misuse.
Interestingly, instances of lack of information literacy are not limited to developing countries alone but have disrupted life and living in developed economies as well which highlights the urgent necessity to drive information literacy campaigns with a consistent global energy. Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is more crucial than ever in ensuring that individuals can critically assess AI-generated content, understand the implications of data-driven media, and engage critically in digital spaces. As AI continues to evolve, MIL must adapt to equip people with the knowledge and skills to navigate this rapidly changing landscape.
Instances of the importance of digital literacy and the destructive effects of artificially induced intelligence platforms were felt as early as 2014 when an AI bot designed by a global internet giant with data from forty million conversations used to accurately predict the mental states of an user through language analysis, was sabotaged when users injected dictatorial and racist inputs on a large scale thereby converting an innocent chat bot into a repulsively racist platform that indiscriminately replied in racist overtones even to innocent inputs. This was the first evidence that whatever the tag, there is nothing ‘artificial’ in intelligence and that most artificial intelligence platforms are an agglomeration of enormous global data generated and collated through individual human inputs.
Paradoxically, people interacting and using AI platforms today are assuming that such platforms are inherently unbiased and accurate and are therefore used to form opinions, arrive at judgements and even decide on future avenues of action. It is becoming increasingly apparent that there shall be little interventions at global governance levels to counter misinformation and fakes other than preventive awareness campaigns. With no official ‘gatekeeping’ in the global information domain, it rests on individual users to be aware of differentiating the true from the false and the genuine from the ‘deepfakes’.
UNESCO as a global body has rightly embarked on a sustained intervention strategy that seeks to bring information literacy to the classrooms by educating learners at their most vulnerable age to responsibly use information on the internet. This strategy also involves empowering learners to laterally ‘read’ internet content to detect inconsistencies, tracing media and information to the original sources, verify authenticity by corroborating through multiple platforms, train as digital detectives by approaching digital information with skepticism prior to verification, and learning to adapt to the changing media landscape.
Policy planners at the level of government shall do well to induce such information verification strategies even at the early education level so that misuse can be detected in time and avoided. In these difficult times, with very few specific and predictable inputs on how the digital information scenario would change in the context of AI, the best way forward would be to empower early learners to adapt consistently and responsibly since the challenges are both real and comprehensive and they are there to stay.
(The writer is Assistant Professor in English, Pritilata Waddedar Mahavidyalaya, Nadia)