Fostering media literacy in the age of deepfakes

MIT News is featuring an article on the Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes project, an effort by Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory professor D. Fox Harrell and The MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality that was supported by a grant in higher education innovation from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL). Professor Harrell and the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality were funded to design both a series of in-class educational experiences for students and an online course to serve more broadly as a resource for educational institutions.
From the article:
 
...professor D. Fox Harrell, has created a free online course, Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes, with the goal of giving educators and independent learners the resources and critical skills to understand the threat of misinformation. In addition to teaching participants how to decipher fact-based assertions from lies and credible sources from hoaxes, the course aims to place deepfakes within a larger history of media manipulation and to show how activists, artists, technologists, and filmmakers are using AI-enabled media for a wide range of civic projects.

The course is implemented as a dynamic, multi-layered website including video and case study materials, as well as offering much more context and information through different self-paced learning modules. An illustrative example used in the course is “In Event of Moon Disaster,” an Emmy-winning MIT Virtuality production co-directed by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund. The project showcases a deepfake of President Nixon delivering the real contingency speech written in 1969 for a scenario in which the Apollo 11 crew was unable to return from the moon, and features numerous learning and analysis resources.
 

Read more on the MIT News site.