Professional Learning for Busy Educators

When seeing is no longer believing
Inside the Pentagon’s race against deepfake videos
Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video – known as “deepfakes” – relatively easy. Making a person appear to say or do something they did not has the potential to take the war of disinformation to a whole new level. Scroll down for more on deepfakes and what the US government is doing to combat them.

“Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”; “ISIS Leader Calls for American Muslim Voters to Support Hillary Clinton.”

These examples of fake news are from the 2016 presidential election campaign. Such highly partisan fabricated stories designed to look like real reporting probably played a bigger role in that bitter election than in any previous American election cycle. The fabrications spread on social media and into traditional news sources in a way that tarnished both major candidates’ characters.

Sometimes the stories intentionally damage a candidate; sometimes the authors are driven only by dollar signs.

Questions about how and why voters across the political spectrum fell for such disinformation have nagged at social scientists since early in the 2016 race. The authors of a new study address these questions with cognitive experiments on familiarity and belief.