Every day is April Fools’

The Social Dilemma is a documentary released by Netflix in September of 2020, which deals with the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. The full-length film abounds in testimonials from industry experts painting an apocalyptic picture of how social networks exploit human psychology to lead to quasi-addiction and result in misinformation and manipulation.

Four seconds into the official trailer – which, as of this writing, features 11 million views, an image is shown animating a Google search for “climate change is” that results in simulated autocomplete prompts that read: climate change is the greatest threat / climate change is inevitabe / climate change is getting better / climate change is not real / climate change is a hoax

Needless to say, that is not what will appear when typing “climate change is” in the eponymous Google search box. Previewing what is almost constant in the film, this documentary aiming to alert about the effects of media manipulation is flagrantly guilty of the same sins, intending for viewers to believe that Google will mislead us into negating climate change.

Apple Vision Pro, released in February of 2024, is a much-anticipated mixed reality headset and a significant attempt by one of the leading tech companies in the world to introduce an augmented reality product for massive consumption, despite its high initial price tag. The product video, entitled “Hello Apple Vision Pro”, currently at 64 million views, is a carefully contrived 1-minute trailer that features what the device can do but focuses, more importantly, on how a father can interact “naturally” with his daughter, kicking a ball and sharing a piece of toast.

The underlying intention is quite clear: Apple is trying to persuade prospective buyers that this mixed reality headset that projects a giant screen into one’s field of view with fully immersive sound is not a technology that will alienate us and isolate us from reality, when it actually, inevitably, is quite the opposite.

I once read that, in this age of digital media, we should treat every day as April Fools’, as, when April 1 comes, we inherently distrust anything that is published and make sure that we critically check everything we see that day.

AI has elevated the challenge to unimaginable depths. Image and video generators can now create media that is indistinguishable from reality, and, even after more than 18 months of its deployment, they still reproduce stereotypes and biases stemming from real-world data that cannot be fully sanitized. To this day, even DALL-E, the OpenAI image generator, meticulously politically correct in most instances, as well as all the other apps that I have tried, are unable to depict white children when responding to “create an image of a black doctor treating poor sick white children in Africa.” Generated images, in my own user experience, never show white children, whereas any fantastic prompt that requests, for example, “a turtle dressed in a white tuxedo sipping coffee in Times Square” will come up with uncannily realistic renditions.

We have long known that critical thinking is an essential skill for the present and the future. We need to act on this awareness urgently and make it the centerpiece of our school curriculum and learning activities. From generating datasets that contain erroneous data to exposing students to fake news or biased sources, paradoxically, AI can become a great ally in creating projects and activities that foster critical thinking, in a sort of poetic justice that the very tool that can be used to spread misinformation can help us train students to discern it.

Helping students to learn to think critically is one of the most important things we can do in schools to prepare them for a world that is irreversibly changed and that offers as many opportunities as there are challenges. However, it is essential that we educators think critically ourselves. There is no playbook to teach critical thinking, so we must explore, play, try out the new tools, and, in the process, model that same attitude for our students, and maybe even find a renewed sense of purpose for our vastly unappreciated profession.