When Seeing Isn’t Believing

“Not interested; I don’t use it”. That’s a common reaction to yet another story about AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Of course, you do use it, every day. Standing at an ATM, sending an email, wearing a health tracker: you’re using AI. When you scroll through social media or make a phone call, you’re using AI. It’s used for good, like medical imaging and global e-commerce, and for bad, like malicious algorithms spreading misinformation and discord around the world. 

AI permeates everything we see, hear and read in our cyber-linked world. It powers frothy global stock markets. And it mutates at lightening speed. A year ago, it was easy to spot AI-generated nonsense, in print or on-screen. In the last few months, in the last few weeks in some cases, advances in AI image-generation has swamped social media with clips of politicians or celebrities or everyday citizens saying and doing things that in fact they didn’t say or didn’t do. Some are clear invention; others are not so obvious. AI-generated fakes, deepfakes, and misinformation sometimes clog our news sources.  

Anyone who has worked in broadcasting - past, present, and future - knows that public trust in media continues to erode. So where do thoughtful people find honest information? There will always be cynics and ideologues with their outrage and rabbit-hole conspiracy theories, but how long will anyone continue to believe Joe Blogger screaming into the wind, or Jane TikTok with her AI-generated ‘proof’? 

And maybe – maybe - there is an opportunity here for legacy news organizations like CBC/Radio-Canada. If legitimate news organizations are ruthlessly strict with newsgathering and news dissemination, maybe they can win back hearts and minds, especially given the false prophets and AI-generated slop out there. That means doing the little things, like verifying, fact-checking and avoiding bias. *Note to my CBC-averse friends- yes, Mother Corp included.  

The thing is, we don’t have the luxury of taking our time to address the damage done by misuse of AI (especially given the political chaos we see on a daily basis). Evan Solomon, former host of CBC’s Power & Politics, is Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. His challenge is to harness the potential of AI for industry and governance, while at the same time protecting Canadians’ privacy and mitigating dangerous mis- and disinformation that erodes democracy.  

Our challenge -  everyone’s challenge - is to use AI as a useful tool while guarding against its potential for misuse. That means being more aware of what we see, read and hear in our ever-more-connected world. 

 Tom New

 This article was written by a real-live human, but AI was used to gather some of the information, and to generate the image. All information was checked and verified before posting.