Shallow-fakes have been around for quite awhile

Dougio

Polar bear on Lake Jefferson, Minnesota

Caught on a date with Laura Bush

It seems like the general public has finally awakened to the fact that not all you read or see on social media is real. After 25 years plus of hammering the importance of information literacy to our students (and staff), will the warnings voiced by school library and technology leaders finally be heeded?

It’s taken pop culture star Taylor Swift becoming the victim of deep-fake pornographic images posted to X to create an outcry. Despite the outright lies and fabrications by politicians and their followers, we as a society seem to be complacent about the sewage that floats about in our social networking feeds. Until now when poor Taylor is being targeted by image prevarication. 

The images above were ones I used in my slideshows when giving talks on the importance of verifying the information one found on the internet. Most often, the images were accompanied by the laughs they were intended to evoke. (I always believe humor was more effective when trying to make a point.) 

The images were, of course, created prior to the now available deep-fake AI tools now available and don’t take a very expert eye to see that my (much younger) face was pasted on to existing photographs. And while the lake in the picture was just outside my backdoor, the polar bear was a stock photo image. To the best of my knowledge, Minnesota has not yet experienced an influx of polar bears on our lakes. 

I do hope the Swifties have more success in combating the naive acceptance of the validity of junk posted on X and other social media than I did in all my years of giving talks and writing articles like Survival Skills for the Information Jungle. Let’s hope they demand some policing of these popular platforms, strengthen their own critical abilities, and don’t simply “shake it off.”