As your kid begins to access the internet, they are likely to be exposed to all kinds of misinformation. Whether it’s sloppy AI content, inaccurate news or inflamed opinions, it’s important that your kid learn the warning signs so that they can use the internet responsibly.
Don’t treat the internet like books
To kids who are being brought up in the internet age, the difference between a post on social media and an entry in a textbook might not be that obvious. After all, they’re both confidently-expressed written statements.
But kids need to understand that the internet is fundamentally different. To demonstrate this, you might find some posts on social media that say things the child knows to be false.
The most important piece of understanding a child can have is that nothing on the internet can be automatically trusted. Once the child understands that, they can start developing ways to sort fact from fiction.
Teach your kid to identify AI
AI is one of the biggest new changes to the world of the internet. Even if people aren’t deliberately using AI to spread falsehood, AI chatbots like ChatGPT have a tendency to “hallucinate” completely made-up facts. Because of this, kids (or adults, for that matter) should never assume AI is correct without double-checking the evidence. And should certainly never turn in homework citing facts that might not exist. Even the AI summaries on top of Google searches can contain wrong information.
How to tell if an image is AI generated
AI-generated images and video present a real challenge. With generative AI tools widely available on the internet, it’s easy for anyone to make “deepfake” videos and photos. Kids should be aware of the signs of AI images, including:
- Incorrect details. This could be people with hands that look weird or have the wrong number of fingers, text that’s blurred or garbled, or lighting and shadows that are inconsistent with one another.
- Overly “airbrushed” look. This can include images of people with weirdly smooth or glossy skin, or an animal whose skin doesn’t have enough texture.
- Incongruous background elements. Background details often don’t make sense, like flamingos flying by in an American cityscape. Or the proportions may be off, like a tree that’s too big for how far away it is.
- Textures that seem off. AI images often are blurred in weird places, or repeat the same textural pattern in unnatural ways, like the surface of a body of water that has the same waves all across it.
One tip is to do a Google reverse image search that will help you see where a photo has been posted and help find the original source.
Learn to be skeptical and check your facts
When it comes to the internet, the more surprising the claim, the less likely it is to be true. But at the same time, kids might be attracted to exactly those kinds of claims, because they’re interesting and provocative.
There are ways to check specific facts. For example, kids can utilize Google’s Fact Check Search. But at the end of the day, kids should look to do more than check all facts against one single source Fact check is about finding multiple, high-quality sources.
Kids should also be skeptical of facts they pick up from influencers on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. Influencers are entertainers first, and they may be sharing their opinions or sensationalized versions of facts to get more views. Facts that fly by on video content can be harder to slow down and fact check. Teach your child to be particularly skeptical of information they get from videos.
More than ever, kids need critical thinking skills to navigate their online lives. They will need to ask good questions, check facts against multiple sources, and develop an intuition for when they’re in an echo chamber. Some of these are things you pick up online, but others are things you learn from going around the world day to day. So even if you’re a parent who doesn’t know much about the internet, you still have a lot that you can teach your kid about common sense.
But even as you teach your kids about how to use good judgement, it’s important to call on elected officials to do their part to make the internet safer for kids. For example, many apps and websites gather up information about their child users and sell them to data brokers, who then can give this personal information to all sorts of shadowy actors that can use it to shape some of the content your child sees online. That’s why we’re calling on the Federal Trade Commission to do more to protect kids’ online data.
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