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Keynote Speaker - Mike Caulfield, Researcher, Author, and Creator of the SIFT Methodology

"Is this what I think it is? Navigating a world of decontextualized evidence and pervasive AI"

The question many stumble on when navigating the web isn't whether something is true or false, but whether the thing they are looking at is "what it looks like." An advocacy site can look like a newspaper, a ten-year-old video can be recycled as a recent event, and a PDF'd preprint can be misread as a peer-reviewed paper. People are fooled by surface features -- how an item looks, reads, or feels, ignoring more important deep features, such as where it came from and who vouches for it.
How will AI, with its mastery of surface style, impact the information environment of the web? What techniques should the public adopt to protect themselves from being bamboozled by its confident prose and compelling multimedia? What techniques are best avoided?
This talk will draw on real world examples showing how our online world is about to change -- albeit in familiar ways.

 

Headshot of Mike CaulfieldAbout the Speaker

Mike Caulfield has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops. His new book with Sam Wineburg, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online, was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2023. His SIFT methodology is taught by hundreds of research libraries across North America, and a shorter version of SIFT instruction, developed with Google, has been taught in public libraries across the world. His more recent research looks at how a degraded understanding of why argumentation is important and how argument works has led to inappropriate approaches to the problem of misinformation.