www.montereycountynow.com october 17-23, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 23 A few minutes later, the students are still stuck. “Oh my god, this is hard!” Isabella offers. Robinson returns with a hint. One photo the teens have identified as AI—of a woman with wildly done-up hair, an elaborate flower crown and vivid eye makeup—is, in fact, real. “Just because it’s artistic doesn’t mean it’s fake,” Robinson offers by way of explanation. Instead, she points them to a background that does not match up quite right behind a supposed person—a sign that it’s a product of generative AI. As this Alisal group works to crack the code, Julius Robinson, a Marina High School senior who is seated at a table across the room, calls out, “We got it, we got it!” The race is on. A few minutes later, the Marina group has cracked a password that enables them to log into a laptop and watch a 30-second video. A scientist named Henry Jones appears in a white coat to announce the findings of a study on a supplement called Euphorigen. Jones has bad news to share with the public after 10 years of research, reporting in the video that the product—which has been used by wealthy people to boost brain activity and productivity—is not effective. The game next directs students to share the video, and they do—only to learn it’s a deepfake. This entire narrative, of course, is a work of fiction—the researcher, the research, Euphorigen, the influencers (both those who support and who oppose the drug)—but the game is real, and the students are as thoughtful as they are fast. They’ve all stumbled into the trap of sharing a video that is bogus. “The idea was, let’s make a game where people have the experience of being fooled, then reflect on that and realize we are all vulnerable,” says Liz Crouse, program coordinator at University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. (The game and corresponding curriculum came from UW’s Information School before the Center officially launched, in 2019.) The game—available online, in addition to this in-person version—was developed with an adult audience in mind, for use at public libraries, but it became the energetic cornerstone in a series of events called Misinfo Day, that UW has hosted for various Washington high schoolers since 2019, inviting students to UW and Washington State University campuses. One-hundred local students, who come together from seven local high schools on Tuesday, May 7, participated in Monterey County’s first-ever Misinfo Day, packed with activities and presentations designed to help them ask and begin to answer such questions. It’s also the first time this curriculum has ever been delivered outside of the state of Washington. Their hope had always been that others might reach out and ask to try this action-packed Misinfo Day and Susan Meister, founder of the Monterey County Media Literacy Coalition, was the first to call. “It’s amazing to see it come together so beautifully,” Crouse says. The Misinfo Day program is one example of the type of learning that will be rolling out more widely as California adopts new standards to teach media literacy in K-12 schools. Monterey High School student Ryan Roth is a member of the winning team in the escape room activity. He sums up their strategy this way: “You’ve got to figure out what’s true or not.” If you can’t tell, he adds: “Go find out more information.” The goal, of course, is to give participants the skills they need in real life, outside of the game world, to determine which information is credible. That we are bombarded with information is not new. The speed of that bombardment, and the technology that can be used to quickly share information or falsify information, is new and ever-changing. A 2019 study at Stanford University gauged 3,446 high school students’ ability to evaluate digital information sources on the internet, and found “No one can escape the fact that we are deluged with misinformation and disinformation,” says Susan Meister, founder of the Monterey County Media Literacy Coalition. “It’s a symptom of the sickness of our society right now. We don’t agree on anything, especially on facts.”
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