AI media is getting harder to spot. So today, we hear how teens can build better AI literacy skills.
Click the play button above to listen to the story.
Story Script:
Reporter: My friend Aashna and I are on our phones, doing what a lot of us probably spend too much time doing - scrolling through social media. Most videos are forgotten as soon as we scroll past them. But sometimes, they stick with us.
AASHNA PARSA: There were these different videos going around of foster dogs going into a room with multiple people, and they would basically run up to their owner...
AASHNA: It was the concept of a dog picking their owner. And I thought that was so wholesome.
Reporter: Some of these videos had hundreds of thousands of likes.
Reporter: After seeing a few of these videos, Aashna was moved. So, she searched on YouTube.
AASHNA: I wanted to see more of these videos. But turns out it was just three that AI had generated and was never a concept.
AASHNA: I actually was fooled by that for a really long time.
AASHNA: And that really made me very upset.
Reporter: I felt kind of angry for her when I heard this… people using AI just to play on our emotions. This video was about foster dogs, but what might happen when the stakes are higher?
Sound of music
Reporter: AI-generated content is getting harder to spot, and for teenagers who spend a lot of their time on social media, the question of “can we even tell anymore” comes up. So I wanted to see how other teenagers are dealing with this world, where seeing doesn’t always mean believing.
SADIE MATT: When you really start to get deeper into the questioning media, you really see how complex media literacy is, and, like, how important it is to be good at it.
Reporter: That’s Sadie Matt. She’s a high schooler in Westchester County, New York. She thinks back to when her teacher played a video in class.
SADIE: She pulls up this video and she's like, "Oh, just watch it." And it's this video of her speaking German, and it looked incredibly real.
Sound of teacher speaking German
SADIE: I was like, "Whoa, this is kind of crazy." And then after the video, she proceeds to say, "That video was actually AI. I cannot speak German." And it was kind of just a shocking moment for me. It was like, look at what AI can do.
Reporter: This was the moment she felt she had to do something.
SADIE: That was the moment where I was like, "I feel like I need to do something about this," and I feel like I need to kind of inspire other people to be media literate and make a change.
Reporter: Sadie is a member of the Youth Advisory Council at the National Association for Media Literacy Education, or NAMLE, a nonprofit that wants to make media literacy an essential life skill. She’s been working with them for almost 3 years now.
Reporter: The Youth Advisory Council has been working on a few projects, including one where they created posts on social media about media literacy:
Sound of NAMLE social media video: "Let’s break down how to fact-check posts like these using NAMLE’s key questions…"
Reporter: And an AI awareness project where they talked to teenagers and experts.
LUCIA: Hello, I’m Lucia with the National Association for Media Literacy Education, and today, we’re going to play some AI trivia and see how much people really know about AI.
Reporter: Sadie also co-founded her school's Student AI Consultory. So students can have a say at board meetings and talk directly to school administrators.
Sound of school board meeting
STUDENT: So I’m not going to lie. I do use AI. And I use it especially in those classes where I feel like there’s a lack of instruction…
Reporter: Generative AI is already changing the way teenagers learn and interact with media. So, Sadie and her classmates, wanted the board to hear their perspective.
SADIE: We kind of wanted them to see really what AI is like, how is it impacting our world. And we got a really positive feedback, actually. All of the people on the board were amazed to kind of hear what we had to say, but also it got them thinking, it got them being like, "This is an urgent matter. We do need to address it."
Reporter: That board meeting happened in February. But there still hasn’t been any school policies on AI since then. Sadie attended another meeting but….
SADIE: I just sat around with the board, and we were talking about AI once again. And they were kind of just going back and forth. It was—we never really made any movement forward.
Reporter: Not only that, the media literacy class that Sadie took at school is being discontinued.
SADIE: Yeah. I was really upset hearing that from my teacher because I'm like, "This is so important. Why can't we have it?"
Reporter: She says that it’s important for teenagers to be involved because we have a perspective that adults just don’t.
SADIE: Especially, when I hear, like, my dad talking about social media and it's, like, completely different from what I think, and it's like a lot of the people who are older necessarily don't have the same, like, viewpoints as we do as someone who's interacting with the media a lot more often and in different ways.
Sound of music fades out
Reporter: In the future, it’s going to be the teenagers of today building the world that we live in. Sadie wants us to think critically, and ask questions about what we’re seeing or hearing…
SADIE: "What do I see right now that can kind of help me keep informed and, like, know what this piece of media is actually trying to make me do?" And so it's always kind of asking those questions and keeping in mind that there could be underlying reasons for this media showing up.
Reporter: To make sure teenagers have these skills, Sadie’s advocating for media literacy to be taught on a larger scale.
SADIE: We really want to get the teachers to be incorporating media literacy into their curriculum a little bit more, because it's gonna impact every subject.
Reporter: And Julia Satterthwaite is doing exactly that - bringing media literacy lessons into schools.
JULIA SATTERTHWAITE: We were able to get it into our district advisory class for all students. So 100% of the students in our district had a media literacy lesson.
JULIA: I think media literacy is the most important skill high school students should have when they graduate.
Reporter: She works in the Fremont Unified School District, which is now going into its third year of a fellowship with the News Literacy Project, an organization that aims to “advance the development and teaching of news literacy in K through 12 education.”
Sound of music
Reporter: So, how exactly do we become more media literate?
Reporter: First, check your emotions.
JULIA: If you're feeling elevated anxiety or if you're feeling anger or if you're feeling super excited, sort of recognizing what feelings you're experiencing when you're interacting with a piece of media is also really important.
Reporter: She also recommends a reverse image search. So, Aashna and I try it…
Reporter: "Search up mother beluga whale escaping research facility on, like, your phone or whatever."
Reporter: So there’s this image going around. Of a whale leaping out of its pool. INTO the OCEAN.
Sound of game show music
Reporter: Aashna is typing so slow…
Reporter: "Just search it up, bruv. It's not that hard."
Sound of typing
AASHNA: This looks like a scene straight out of Finding Dory with the whale shark.
Reporter: She reads the results.
AASHNA: Alaska Public Media. "No belugas have ever escaped. Grant said that in the SeaLife Center's 25-year history, a beluga whale has never escaped from the center." Like, ignoring the absurdity of the situation, it very clearly is AI.
Reporter: "I feel like if I didn't know how a beluga whale looked, that I might have been fooled."
Reporter: Then we decide to try something that’s a little bit more significant.
AASHNA: Fact or fiction: Trump renaming nation's capital?
Sound of fake Trump audio
Reporter: We use another one of Satterthwaite’s recommendations, lateral reading.
AASHNA: Did Trump actually change the name of to District of America?
Sound of typing
Reporter: We look at Snopes, a fact-checking website, and ABC 10.
AASHNA: Fact or fiction: Trump renaming nation's capital? Fake audio claims Trump wants to rename DC.
AASHNA: Would you say that those are pretty reliable? Yeah. I mean, nothing is really reliable as we're starting to learn but especially in this conversation about AI. Because think, you can't really trust anything nowadays. So even most people think this is real, even if they—no matter their views on him, they would think it's real. But the problem is now we just can't believe anything.
Reporter: Fakes are getting more and more convincing, and misinformation has the potential to reach farther than ever. I feel like when we can’t even agree on whether things are real or not, it can pull people apart.
JULIA: Media will continue to become sort of a divisive component that separates people, because they're all kind of looking at content in their own echo chambers.
Reporter: At least for now, I’ll be thinking critically about things I see online. But that won’t solve everything. Joanna Kao reports on AI accountability. And she looks at the people and companies behind these AI tools. She says media literacy alone is only part of the solution.
JOANNA KAO: Media literacy is a little bit like, once something has happened, you can use a Band-Aid and continue to try to lessen the effects of the misinformation or disinformation. But the better thing is just to remove the sharp object.
Reporter: In other words, teaching teenagers to spot fakes matters, but so does asking the companies to take responsibility for the impact of these tools.
Reporter: These companies should also be involving people in the design process as much as possible.
JOANNA: And if people start thinking about that earlier in the process, I think we end up with much better technology that really helps us instead of technology that can be incredibly damaging.
Reporter: And she acknowledges that teenagers are the ones growing up with this technology.
JOANNA: If the audience is teenagers, you know, your audience are the people who will be shaping how technology works in the future.
Reporter: So, we have to listen to teenagers like Sadie so we can make sure that the technology being developed helps us, not harms us.
Sound of music
Reporter: Aashna and I still scroll through videos all the time. But now, instead of immediately believing what we see, we know how to question it.
AASHNA: So do you think that's AI?
Reporter: Well, this is, in my opinion, 100% AI.
Reporter: It’s still scary, living in a world where it’s getting harder to tell what’s true or not. But I do have hope. From Sadie Matt, I learned that there are other teens who are feeling the same way and doing something about it. From Julia Satterthwaite, I learned that there are adults taking steps to make sure my generation has the skills needed to navigate new technologies. From Joanna Kao, I learned the companies putting out these AI tools also have to take responsibility. I used to think of AI as just this piece of technology, but now, I’m thinking about the people. The people who are making it, the people who are using it, and the teenagers who can shape what it looks like in the future.
In San Jose, I’m Unaysah Ron for TBH