Do any of these resonate with you?
1. Difficulty discerning fact from fiction - undermines confidence in the media you read.
2. Echo chambers and filter bubbles - reinforcing existing beliefs and filtering out opposing views can be exhausting.
4. Confusion over AI's role - a lack of transparency and literacy around AI's growing role in the information ecosystem. Who’s really in control of the content?
5. Overwhelm and fatigue - the mental effort required to critically evaluate it all can be exhausting and lead to tuning out or just accepting things at face value.
I decided to ask someone who has been thinking about these issues and applying her insights to her use of media in your work and personal life - Lily Chambers.
Podcast summary
In this episode of AI for Lifelong Learners, I welcome Lily Chambers, a conversational AI designer, to discuss the crucial topic of media literacy in an age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. As AI-powered tools like language models and image generators become more ubiquitous, Lily emphasizes the importance of understanding how these technologies work and using them ethically.
Drawing from her background in conversation design and humanities, Lily explains that while excitement about AI's potential is justified, it's essential that people develop the skills to evaluate the information these tools generate and share critically. She argues for having personal standards for interacting with AI-created content.
The conversation also delves into the role of algorithms in shaping the media we consume, often in subtle ways that confirm our biases. Lily and Tom discuss strategies for improving media literacy, such as seeking balanced news sources and being open to challenging one's views.
While acknowledging that propaganda and misinformation are not new problems, Lily notes that the sheer volume of content we interact with today makes strong media literacy skills more vital than ever. She leaves listeners with the promise of an upcoming article featuring concrete tips for sharpening these abilities.
Join me and Lily Chambers for an insightful exploration of what it means to be a savvy consumer of information in an AI-driven world.
Here are the key points from the conversation, with timestamps:
1. [00:00:25] Lily's background includes being a conversational AI designer, studying how people understand information through digital media in grad school, and growing up in an AI-loving household.
2. [00:02:34] Media literacy requires skills in locating/using information and critical thinking. It involves knowing digital tools and using them communicatively through social engagement.
3. [00:04:08] The excitement over AI tools like ChatGPT has outpaced literacy of them. People know what they are but not totally how they work. It's important to have media literacy skills to parse how information from AI was created.
4. [00:06:40] Most current technology is a "black box" that can't be easily taken apart and understood, unlike older technologies like radios. Different generations have varying levels of literacy with digital information.
5. [00:08:30] The ubiquity of AI raises concerns about fake information that looks very convincing, like deepfake videos. Critical thinking is needed to interrogate what seems true.
6. [00:11:26] Algorithms serving content raise issues for media literacy. People don't fully realize how deeply algorithms are trained to learn a user's preferences.
7. [00:14:00] Focusing on transient "tells" of AI-generated content is less useful than having one's own values for interacting with AI-created media.
8. [00:16:42] Tips include: not sharing personal writing with language models, reading well-rounded news sources, and supporting human artists over AI art.
9. [00:18:58] While propaganda isn't new, the high volume of media people now consume makes media literacy skills more important than ever. Looking at information in a balanced way is key.
10. [00:21:11] Yellow journalism in the late 1800s emphasized sensationalism over facts, showing these issues aren't fundamentally new, just more pervasive now.
You can read more about media literacy and subscribe to Lily’s newsletter here.
Discussions on media literacy with Lily Chambers