News / Articles

Raising Savvy Kids in an AI World

Daditorial
RAISING SAVVY KIDS IN AN AI WORLD

By: Cody Harris | June 20, 2024

The other day, I decided to run a little experiment with my two middle-school aged boys. I showed each of them a picture that had come across my “X” feed earlier that day–a giant great white shark that had washed up on a beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. People were milling around the great beast, whose mouth was spotted with blood, its razorlike teeth visible through its open mouth. I showed the photo to my oldest son, a happy-go-lucky 12 year old who loves nature and animals. I asked, “What do you make of this picture?”. His reaction was visceral and immediate. “Woah! That is amazing!” he said, eyes wide. “How did that happen? What did they do with the shark?” I then showed the image to my younger son, who has always been the more skeptical of the pair. He stared at the picture, head cocked to one side, looked back up at me. “Is it fake?” he asked.

It was fake. The picture, which rocketed around the web and generated millions of views, was AI generated. It never happened. There was no shark on the beach, no people staring at it. But, the picture looked extremely lifelike and real. I couldn’t blame my older son for being taken in by it. And AI and deepfake technology is only going to improve, further blurring the line between reality and fantasy.

This experiment made me ask myself what I could do – and more importantly, what I need to do – as a parent to prepare my kids for a world in which truth and fiction become nearly impossible to discern online. With so much of their social lives, education, and entertainment happening online, sorting reality from falsity will be a crucial skill. But how do we raise our children not to trust their own eyes and ears?

For now, there are some telltale signs of AI generated images. AI notoriously struggles with human hands, often throwing in a few extra fingers. Skin often appears strangely smooth. Shadows and lighting seem weird. And words and signage can become garbled or appear as gibberish. Often, if you look closely enough at the picture, you can find something just off about it, and that should clue you in that you may be looking at a computer-generated figment of someone’s imagination rather than an accurate visual representation of a moment in time. But these kinks will certainly be worked out, and soon.

AI generated texts are even harder to spot. There are online tools available (themselves AI models) that claim to be able to identify AI-written texts and images, but these are not foolproof and have been found to make mistakes. So, using AI tools to identify AI content is hardly a panacea (and, by the way, I have written this article myself, instead of just feeding a prompt into ChatGPT. I promise!)

I’ve come to the conclusion that rather than look for a technological solution to this problem, it’s far more important to teach kids a baseline level of skepticism about what they consume online. I am trying to instill in my kids a basic value: assume everything you see and hear online is fake until proven otherwise. Don’t leap to conclusions. The more amazing, emotionally engaging, and fantastical something is, the more skeptical you should be. Your friends, whom you trust, may send you something they swear is true. They may be wrong.

So, when we come across some realistic looking images online, I show my kids how to search the web for corroborating evidence. Is that photo really real, or has it already been identified as fake? Are there reputable sources reporting on the event depicted? If not, that’s another red flag.

But how can you tell if a source on the internet is reputable? That requires another set of internet literacy skills. While at a recent lecture on this issue, I learned a tip that was brand new to me. If you search for a website on Google, next to the link you’ll see three dots, aligned vertically in a row. If you click on those dots, it will provide information about the website in question, allowing you to determine whether it’s legitimate, biased, or a scam. Who knew? Our kids should.

These may sound like the rantings of a middle-aged luddite, but I truly believe that the ability to deftly navigate an online world full of false and misleading videos, texts, and images will be a key – perhaps the key – skill that our kids will need to thrive as critical thinkers and informed citizens in the coming decades. I hope that schools are weaving these sorts of lessons into their educational programming, but either way, kids will need lots of reinforcement from the grown-ups around them (who themselves get snookered by the occasional fake viral post).

Teaching kids about online misinformation may lead to some eye rolls. And maybe our kids already know more about this stuff than we do. But in an online sea full of fake sharks, our kids will need to keep their heads about them so they don’t get reeled in themselves.

Cody Harris lives in Kentfield with his wife, Rebecca. They have two grade-school aged boys, Emmett and Levi, and a pre-school aged daughter, Annanit. When they’re not chasing their brood around, Cody’s a litigator and Rebecca is an RN and Lactation Consultant.