Dietram Scheufele, faculty researcher and dean of the School of Life Science Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent decades studying public reactions to new technologies.
Now, the emergence of artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, is changing how we teach students about the disinformation landscape and the future of AI, Scheufele said.
Scheufele’s research spans two broad research areas that explore core questions about the role emerging technologies play in our everyday lives. And how best to craft policies around these emerging technologies while considering our ability to scrutinize information as members of our democracy.
“How do different types of citizens understand and use new technologies such as AI? What are their concerns? And what are their concerns about what we as a society should do? But what if it contradicts what science allows us to do,” says Scheufele. “And AI is a perfect example of that, pushing problems like misinformation and disinformation into a whole new stratosphere, bolstering the problem with generative AI and the ability to create misinformation from scratch.”
The Cap Times recently spoke with Scheufele about his work and how the changing information and technology landscape is shaping how he approaches research and educating the next generation.
How would you explain AI to the public?
We are now able to collect almost all the data that is sent to us. So you have much more storage space than ever before.
And second, we have the computational power to sort through these data with speed and complexity that exceeds human ability. That’s where the word “artificial” came from. The idea of replicating human intelligence on a (larger) scale, both in terms of the data it can consider and its ability to quickly classify those data.
What role do you think AI is playing in the spread of disinformation?
AI is part of every element of the misinformation problem and its solutions. What does that mean? Where does misinformation come from and how is it created? ChatGPT is considered by many to be synonymous with AI. ChatGPT is just one example, but one that highlights the possibilities. Because you can download an app on your phone and create non-existent images and art from scratch. We now have technology that allows people to speak in real time, and computers generate, say, a video of Donald Trump and my voice. And the video speaks in Donald Trump’s voice with Donald Trump’s face, it looks like the real video but it’s actually me who’s talking behind the scenes and they’re indistinguishable from reality I’m getting there.
Add to this the fact that you can do some kind of real honest journalism more efficiently. When reporting on the stock market, we have long used intelligent algorithms to write short news stories. Did Airbnb stock outperform the Dow today? AI could easily write that. But of course, if you take it further, you suddenly have a story written with visuals that look pretty believable, such as drone explosions over Moscow, but I don’t know if that’s true. or not.
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What role do you think journalism plays in the fight against disinformation?
Journalism is interesting. This is because they are not only the subjects of large-scale information systems, but also the guardians of democracy, so to speak. These two roles are not necessarily complementary in an AI environment.
California is passing a law that would make Facebook and other platforms pay for journalism content. Canada has done this before. Australia has tried this before. And Facebook quickly said, “We’re just going to block media companies if they pay you to publish, say, a Cap Times story.” At this point, neither the media companies nor the government, which are already running on pretty thin margins, have a really good answer to that. We are definitely in a David and Goliath situation where a handful of big tech companies really have all the power and governments are very slow to catch up.
So it’s part of journalism’s part in a rapidly changing information ecology.
But the second thing that really matters, and I think democracy needs to rediscover for itself, is the importance of carefully curated information. It is naive to think that individual news consumers can or will sort through all the signals and noise that come their way and determine what is true and what is not. I don’t have the bandwidth to do this. That is why journalism has traditionally played such an important role. Not only does journalism help us distinguish signal from noise, but it also tells us why signals are important to our daily lives.
How can news consumers be educated on how to identify disinformation, especially disinformation generated using AI?
Dietram Scheufele Professor of Science Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Let’s be a little optimistic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we complained a lot about social media and misinformation. But of course, in the midst of Covid-19, I used a Twitter list to curate a list of journalists I knew had covered the subject for a long time. The New York Times and other local journalists I know have been researching and writing about infectious diseases for the last 20 years. And suddenly, yes, I have billions of misinformation-spreading tweets, but I also have one column of carefully curated journalism information in my Tweetdeck.
So one good piece of advice is to have a curated list of journalists who will be a credible source of information should things become overly politicized or politicized, or misinformation is prevalent. I think that’s probably the beacon of hope that social media gives us access to those journalists in a fairly direct way.
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What is one of the core messages you give your students about the changes in the information landscape these days?
I teach a freshman class of 300 students about science, media and society. So we address exactly those questions. Classes always become more of an exercise in what’s going on in the world around us.
When I taught it last fall, towards the end, students started coming up and saying, “Have you heard about this new thing?” We were talking about AI, and then ChatGPT came along and everyone wanted to talk about AI. It’s actually a great time to teach a class, especially at Wisconsin State University, which has some great students who I think are very well prepared for this new world, but who already have a lot of interest in the subject. I think I’m enrolled in
I think there are probably two important lessons. One is that the University of California is preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist. Change is fundamental. Five months ago, there was no job like Product Manager for Generative AI or ChatGPT. Now they’re posted left, right, and center, but eventually those jobs will go away again, as the AI will eventually be able to help create the best prompts for his ChatGPT. You are basically entering a world where your career is not predetermined, but I think it’s an exciting time for students because they will likely change careers in response to changes in the world around them.
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