Week 3 was a less busy week than the few prior, and a nice reset before reading break. Our group missed our meeting due to a member heading home early for the break. On my end a chest infection has been sapping my energy and making it difficult to focus for too long. Although I was still interested in the week’s topics: Artificial intelligence and academic integrity. Relevant to my inquiry into digital literacy in the modern age, AI is one of the biggest culprits blurring the line between reality and fantasy. While the long term effects are still unknown, in the short term the goalposts of proficiency have shifted. The ability to prompt AI can be newly instrumental to careers outside of the digital sector. A generally accepted concept of what’s allowed both legally and morally have not yet been established. This leads to large grey zones: can AI art be used for concept/reference pieces? Brainstorming? Final products? 

Beyond simple image or text generation, botting and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing the way the internet functions. In 2022 Timothy Shoup of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies was quoted as “in the scenario where GPT-3 ‘gets loose’, the internet would be completely unrecognizable” and predicts such a scenario could see 99%< of internet content being artificially generated.1 A study by the CBC also found that video hoaxes make up roughly 60 percent of all fact-checked claims that include media.2 Fact-checking is an ever present part of modern day social media and the internet at large. Both made-up statements and fake facts delivered with bad intentions are rampant in an ecosystem featuring anonymity. Being able to parse out the truth on the internet may be the most important element of digital literacy today.

  1. What if 99% of the Metaverse is made by AI? Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. https://cifs.dk/news/what-if-99-of-the-metaverse-is-made-by-ai ↩︎
  2. Pearson, J. (2024, May 28). Google research shows the fast rise of AI-generated misinformation. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/artificial-intelligence-misinformation-google-1.7217275 ↩︎