News coverage from March 2023 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.
- Mother Jones (March 7): “The company offering free health care to East Palestine? It’s a right-wing, anti-vax project”
CIP postdoctoral scholar Anna Lee Swan was interviewed and quoted in a Mother Jones article about a company that offered free health care services after the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, noting that the company is an example, as the magazine writes, of “the ‘wellness’ industry’s continued reliance on emotional and moral appeals that take advantage of moments of tragedy, pain, or uncertainty.”
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- The Associated Press (March 20): “Digital literacy: Can the republic ‘survive an algorithm’?”
CIP co-founder and UW Information School associate professor Jevin West was interviewed and featured in an Associated Press article about media literacy education, which included a spotlight on MisinfoDay, an annual educational event the CIP co-presents with Washington State University’s Murrow College of Communication. “Maybe eventually, someday, nationally here in the United States, we have a day devoted to the idea of media literacy,” West told the AP. “There are all sorts of things we can do in terms of regulations, technology, in terms of research, but nothing is going to be more important than this idea of making us more resilient” to misinformation. MisinfoDay at UW Seattle, and an interview with West, were also featured by an Associated Press video feature, “Teachers push for misinformation education.”
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- GeekWire (March 20): “High school students learn how to spot misinformation at UW’s ‘Misinfo Day’ event”
Workshops and activities at MisinfoDay, an annual educational program for high school students, teachers and librarians co-presented through a statewide partnership between the CIP and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, were featured by GeekWire, including “how to debunk online misinformation like the viral TikTok ‘garlic challenge,’ in which people shove garlic cloves up their nose and create a giant mucous gusher.”
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- Real Change Seattle (March 22): “UW hosts misinformation conference for local high school students”
In an article featuring MisinfoDay, an annual educational program for high school students, teachers and librarians co-presented through a statewide partnership between the CIP and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Liz Crouse, who helped launch the first MisinfoDay as a MLIS student at the UW Information School and now is MisinfoDay’s program coordinator, said: “My hope is that every Washington teacher would be able to either get to an event or go on our [online] library of content they can do in their classroom and find something that they’re like, ‘Yes, this would be great, I’ll do this for my Misinfo Day in my classroom.’ I also hope that other universities will become partner institutions.”
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- Associated Press (March 23): “Trump arrested? Putin jailed? Fake AI images spread online”
CIP co-founder Jevin West, a UW Information School associate professor, was interviewed by The Associated Press about how fake images generated by AI tools shared online “add noise during crisis events” and “increases the cynicism level. You start to lose trust in the system and the information that you are getting.”
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- The Atlantic (March 28): “Why you fell for the fake pope coat”
In an article exploring the ways AI-generated images are designed to deceive people, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel features insights from CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield. Warzel writes, citing Caulfield: “Successive technologies, from the early internet, to social media, to artificial intelligence, have each targeted different information-processing heuristics and cheapened them in succession. The cumulative effect conjures an eerie image of technologies like a roiling sea, slowly chipping away at the necessary tools we have for making sense of the world and remaining resilient. A slow erosion of some of what makes us human.” Caulfield’s observations in The Atlantic were also featured in a Smithsonian magazine article about the ethics of AI-generated images.
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- The Seattle Times (March 31): “The chatbot era: Better or worse off?”
In a contributed article for The Seattle Times Opinion section, CIP co-founder Jevin West explores the looming impacts of AI-generated chatbots: “From my perspective, as a researcher who studies misinformation and its effects on society, chatbots will be vectors of propaganda, they will make it harder to discern truth, and they will further erode trust in our institutions. I see two main reasons for this: They are bullshitters at scale, and they are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse engineer.”
