How to spot AI-generated political ads before you vote

You know, we have been seeing so many political ads on this TV station, wherever you go. And, you know, even years ago, you had to figure out whether they were true, they were false. And now you add in artificial intelligence, AI, and there's a lot of people asking a lot of questions. So we got a guy we want to talk to, Corey Barker. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for having me. Good afternoon. Okay, so I'm going to say you're a professor from Penn State. Under your name, it's going to say The Pennsylvania State University. Do you have a preference? No, that's fine. Okay, cool. So how do we tell? I mean, I have older parents, I have kids, they're all looking at this stuff. Where do you even begin? It's really difficult, and I think people are increasingly concerned about the circulation of mis- and disinformation related to elections, especially connected to AI-generated content. We're seeing, especially with the race here in PA, the ad from the Garrity campaign focused on Josh Shapiro that is AI-generated, showing a version of him and not revealing that it's AI until about 45 seconds in. So I want to stop right there. I saw that. And it tripped me out and I've interviewed the governor and I was like, he looks a lot like the governor, whoever this fake AI person is. They could have probably made him look more like the governor if they really wanted to trick us. Yeah. And I think that we're in really murky legal territory. There is no PA law on the books that allows in this case would allow Josh Shapiro, the Shapiro campaign to sue the Garrity campaign or whoever helped fund this ad for AI generated material. There's no there's no law on the books to prevent that. Right. So I think there is some question about how much you can push to present someone in an AI generated form. But it's obviously very strategic to wait 45 seconds in to say I was AI generated and connect that to Shapiro's potential relationship to bringing data center operations here to PA. So it raises a lot of ethical and legal questions for sure. OK, so again, they told us, but it was way too late. They should have started with like, hey, I'm a fake governor. And so this is blah, blah, blah. But again, there's stuff everywhere. When you're talking to your students, when you're out in the restaurant and someone's Someone's asking you about it. Do you give them a starting point? Like back in the day, it'd be like, dude says something, goes to black and white, then there's big letters. So we knew who was doing the ad. It was the opponent. Now we don't know who's doing it. Yeah, I mean, I think the foundational tips that we always give are doing some version of what we call lateral reading, right? You encounter something and then you go to a secondary or tertiary trusted source. So you see an ad on TV. So then you go to a new source that you trust and try to cross check that information. Increasingly, people are using AI related tools to do that, right? So they're searching on Google and now getting the AI summary, or they're just typing it in to chat GPT or Claude to ask for that information. So that's potentially okay. But you then want to probably cross-check that with another more conventional news source that you trust. Or if you're searching in chat GPT, maybe also search in Google Gemini to see if you can find credible information from multiple sources. But that puts so much onus on us as citizens, as consumers, to do all of this work to determine if something is true. The things that are potentially manipulating us or trying to provoke us are more sophisticated than ever. So it's even more important to do that. But it is a lot of work for us. Yeah. And again, I think about older people that aren't as handy with the phone, that don't know the hallucination rate of chat versus Claude. Do I get credit for using that vocab word, by the way? Perfect. Yeah. You sound just like a college junior. Yeah. Thank you. I love it. All right. I'm going to say that you're a PhD from Penn State because I call it Penn State. That works for me. All right. Thank you so much. It's something we all need to know about. I know today's the last day of Media Literacy Week, so it's a perfect time to have you on. Thanks for making the time for us.