On Teenagers, and Artificial Intelligence

[Stephen3141]

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/29/health/teens-ai-generated-content-trust-wellness/index.html

This article is SPECIFICALLY about teenagers, and whether or not they believe
what they see online.

There is a growing doubt among teeagers, that what they see (graphical pictures or
videos), are real. About half of teenagers say that they have been deceived by
generative AI fakes.

This growing doubt, by teenagers, also applies to institutions.
This is a horrible trend, as it meters that the growing number of graphical fakes
on the Internet, is undermining the believability of American institutions. Note
that American institutions, have nothing necessarily to do with graphical images
that appear online.

"How does this get fixed? The Common Sense study found that 74% of teens agree that generative AI “should have visible warnings that its outputs could be harmful, biased, or wrong.” And 73% of teens want content generated by AI “to be labeled or watermarked” to show its source."

Note that the wish of most teens, will not fix the problem. Teenagers tend to believe
what their friends post. BUT, this is not really a metric of whether or not the posted
material is real. The posted material could be from some conspiracy theory source.

NOTE: the older method (back in the olden times, when people read books, and
certain books were carefully fact-checked by publishers) of including authoritative references
with written material, is GONE. This vacuum of fact-checking, on social media, is a core
problem for American democracy, and American institutions.

This is a problem for Christians, because the Bible presents truth, and reality, as concepts
that are independent of some opinion of our friend, or some popular story that is told
on some web site.

This is a problem for the hard sciences, and logic-based disciplines, because the
scientific methodology, and the rules of formal logic, are independent of what YOUR
FRIEND thinks is true, and are independent of what some POPULAR story on the
Internet, or what some Internet influencer, is saying.
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This is a problem for the younger American generations, that are image-centric, and
have little in terms of formal logic methodology to follow serious fact-checking methodologies.

I have said it before, and will repeat it again: this massive multiplication of fake
information on the Internet, could make the Internet largely useless. And, this is what
the abandoning of fact-checking, would lead to.