Presenter: Yuxi Lou, Cissy Lei

Judging News Credibility in the Age of AI

Type of Presentation: Poster

Abstract

This project explores how university students and instructors judge the credibility of real news, fake news, and AI-generated news on social media. We are interested in this topic because we noticed even though many people know fake news exists, some people still believe and share the misinformation blindly, and certain social media users may trust false or AI-generated information without careful checking. Previous studies have shown that fake news can spread quickly online because sometimes social media platforms cannot effectively verify information. However, there is still a gap in understanding why real news, fake news and artificial intelligence-generated news affect different users in different ways. Therefore, our research aims to examine how individual differences affect people's judgment on real news, fake news, and news generated by AI. This leads to our research question: How do university students and instructors judge the credibility of real news, fake news, and Al-generated news-style posts, and what strategies do they use to explain their judgments? Our research method will be qualitative, we would invite approximately 6 participants, including 3 first year Vantage Arts students and 3 instructors. And we plan to show the participants a real news, a fake news, and news generated by ChatGPT. Then ask participants whether they think this post is real, fake, or AI-generated through certain questions. We expect instructors may observe the source and wording, because they have more academic experience. While Vantage students may pay more attention to pictures, typesetting, and layout. Also, AI-generated news-style posts may create the most uncertainty. The limitation of this study is that the number of participants is small, so the results cannot represent all university students and instructors.

Biography

Yuxi and Cissy are first-year Arts students at UBC. Yuxi enjoys skiing, flying airplanes, and travelling. Cissy enjoys reading, watching films, and photography. Both of them are interested in fake news and social media, especially how different experiences shape people’s judgments and perspectives. Therefore, their shared interest prompts them to examine their proposed project, which explores how do people judge the credibility of real news, fake news, and Al-generated news-style posts, and what strategies do they use to explain their judgments.