FTI 2024

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.