{"course":{"slug":"ai-for-students","title":"AI for Students","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students","level":"beginner","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"misinformation-and-what-you-share","title":"Misinformation, and what you pass on","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/misinformation-and-what-you-share","position":46,"of":73,"minutes":8,"answer":"Verify provenance rather than appearance (reverse image search, the primary record, the date, and lateral reading about who runs the page) because generated media can no longer be judged by looking at it.","keyIdea":"Verify provenance rather than appearance (reverse image search, the primary record, the date, and lateral reading about who runs the page) because generated media can no longer be judged by looking at it."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The same skill, outside the essay\n\nEverything in this module is source criticism, and it does not stop at the bibliography. The most consequential use of it is what you forward to a family group, repeat in an argument, or believe about a subject you will vote on.\n\nAI has changed this in three specific ways, and it is worth being precise rather than alarmed.\n\n**Volume.** Producing plausible text and images is now nearly free, so there is more of everything, including more well-written wrong things. The ratio has shifted, not the nature of the problem.\n\n**Quality of forgery.** Synthetic images, audio and video are good enough that visual inspection is no longer a reliable test. The old advice (look for six fingers, look for the artefacts) is already out of date and will get more so.\n\n**Personalisation.** Generated content can be produced for a specific audience at scale, so the material you encounter is more likely to be shaped to what you already believe.\n\n## What still works\n\nProvenance, not appearance. Since you cannot verify a video by looking at it, verify where it came from.\n\n- **Who published this first?** Reverse image search (Google Images, TinEye, Yandex) will often find an image's earlier appearances, which frequently reveals it is from a different event or year.\n- **Does any organisation with something to lose report it?** Not agreement across many sources, which is now cheap to manufacture, but reporting by an organisation that would suffer for being wrong.\n- **Is there a primary record?** For a claim about a law, a court case, a statistic or a scientific finding, the primary record is usually online and free. Statistical agencies, official gazettes, court databases, the paper itself.\n- **What is the date?** Old material recirculated as new is far more common than fabrication, and much easier to check.\n\n**Lateral reading** is the technique that research on this consistently finds effective: instead of scrutinising the page in front of you, open new tabs and find out who runs it. Professional fact-checkers do this immediately; students left to themselves usually stay on the page and evaluate its design, which is exactly what a designed page is for.\n\n## Detection tools do not settle it\n\nThere are tools claiming to detect AI-generated images, audio and text. Their accuracy varies enormously, they degrade as generators improve, and they produce both false positives and false negatives at rates that make a single verdict unusable as evidence. Treat any such output as one weak signal.\n\nProvenance standards like **C2PA**, which attach signed metadata about how a file was made, are more promising because they carry a verifiable chain rather than a guess. Adoption is partial and metadata can be stripped, so absence of provenance proves nothing yet.\n\n## Your own exposure\n\nThe uncomfortable part. You are more likely to pass on something false when it confirms what you already think, when it makes you angry, and when it is about a group you do not belong to. That is not a character flaw; it is how everybody works, and knowing it is the only available defence.\n\nSo the practical rule: **the stronger your reaction, the more checking it needs.** Content that makes you want to share it immediately is content built to do that, whether by a person, an algorithm or a generator.\n\n## A worked check, in ninety seconds\n\nA video circulates showing a politician saying something inflammatory. Before forming a view:\n\n1. Reverse image search a frame. If the footage is old or from elsewhere, this usually surfaces it immediately.\n2. Search the claimed quotation in quotation marks with a date filter. Real remarks by public figures are reported by many outlets within hours.\n3. Look for the full clip. Edited-down quotations that reverse a meaning are far more common than synthetic video, and much cheaper to make.\n4. Check who first posted it and when.\n\nNotice that only step one is about the file, and none of it requires judging whether the video looks real.\n\n## Why this belongs in a study course\n\nBecause it is the same skill, and because your subject is not sealed off from it. A biology student will meet health misinformation. An economics student will meet manipulated charts. A law student will meet confident wrong claims about rights, in enormous volume. Being the person in your family or your group who can find the primary source is a small, real, useful thing, and it comes free with learning to write an essay properly.\n\nAnd the traffic runs both ways. If you would not put an unverified claim in an essay because a marker would catch it, notice that the standard should not depend on whether anybody is marking."},"check":{"question":"Why is agreement across many web sources a weaker check than it used to be?","options":[{"text":"Because search engines now rank generated content higher, so agreeing pages are more likely to be surfaced together.","correct":false,"tempting":"Asserts a ranking behaviour that is not established, and locates the problem in retrieval rather than in the sources themselves."},{"text":"Because generating many plausible pages is nearly free, so agreement no longer implies independent sources.","correct":true},{"text":"Because most people now read summaries rather than original pages, so agreement is measured on derived text.","correct":false,"tempting":"Describes a change in reading behaviour rather than in what the sources are, and the check would still work if the underlying pages were independent."},{"text":"Because fact-checking organisations cannot keep pace with the volume, so incorrect claims stay uncorrected across more sites for longer.","correct":false,"tempting":"Names a real capacity problem, but slow correction is a different failure from a lack of independence between the agreeing sources."}]},"prev":{"slug":"building-a-bibliography","title":"Building a bibliography you can defend","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/building-a-bibliography"},"next":{"slug":"writing-with-it","title":"Writing With It Without Losing Your Voice","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/writing-with-it"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Misinformation, and what you pass on', in AI for Students. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/misinformation-and-what-you-share (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Misinformation, and what you pass on","courseTitle":"AI for Students","module":{"index":5,"slug":"research-and-evidence","title":"Research, sources and evidence"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Verify provenance rather than appearance (reverse image search, the primary record, the date, and lateral reading about who runs the page) because generated media can no longer be judged by looking at it.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-same-skill-outside-the-essay","runs":[{"text":"The same skill, outside the essay"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Everything in this module is source criticism, and it does not stop at the bibliography. The most consequential use of it is what you forward to a family group, repeat in an argument, or believe about a subject you will vote on."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"AI has changed this in three specific ways, and it is worth being precise rather than alarmed."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Volume.","b":true},{"text":" Producing plausible text and images is now nearly free, so there is more of everything, including more well-written wrong things. The ratio has shifted, not the nature of the problem."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Quality of forgery.","b":true},{"text":" Synthetic images, audio and video are good enough that visual inspection is no longer a reliable test. The old advice (look for six fingers, look for the artefacts) is already out of date and will get more so."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Personalisation.","b":true},{"text":" Generated content can be produced for a specific audience at scale, so the material you encounter is more likely to be shaped to what you already believe."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-still-works","runs":[{"text":"What still works"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Provenance, not appearance. Since you cannot verify a video by looking at it, verify where it came from."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Who published this first?","b":true},{"text":" Reverse image search (Google Images, TinEye, Yandex) will often find an image’s earlier appearances, which frequently reveals it is from a different event or year."}],[{"text":"Does any organisation with something to lose report it?","b":true},{"text":" Not agreement across many sources, which is now cheap to manufacture, but reporting by an organisation that would suffer for being wrong."}],[{"text":"Is there a primary record?","b":true},{"text":" For a claim about a law, a court case, a statistic or a scientific finding, the primary record is usually online and free. Statistical agencies, official gazettes, court databases, the paper itself."}],[{"text":"What is the date?","b":true},{"text":" Old material recirculated as new is far more common than fabrication, and much easier to check."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Lateral reading","b":true},{"text":" is the technique that research on this consistently finds effective: instead of scrutinising the page in front of you, open new tabs and find out who runs it. Professional fact-checkers do this immediately; students left to themselves usually stay on the page and evaluate its design, which is exactly what a designed page is for."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"detection-tools-do-not-settle-it","runs":[{"text":"Detection tools do not settle it"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"There are tools claiming to detect AI-generated images, audio and text. Their accuracy varies enormously, they degrade as generators improve, and they produce both false positives and false negatives at rates that make a single verdict unusable as evidence. Treat any such output as one weak signal."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Provenance standards like "},{"text":"C2PA","b":true},{"text":", which attach signed metadata about how a file was made, are more promising because they carry a verifiable chain rather than a guess. Adoption is partial and metadata can be stripped, so absence of provenance proves nothing yet."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"your-own-exposure","runs":[{"text":"Your own exposure"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The uncomfortable part. You are more likely to pass on something false when it confirms what you already think, when it makes you angry, and when it is about a group you do not belong to. 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