Disinformation, Dinosaur Facts and AI
(A version of this article was published in Intrepid Ed News January 19, 2023 as ‘Disinformation, Misinformation and Dinosaur Facts’).
Technology firms have been utilising ‘destructive scanning’ since about 2024 for training AI models. This is an industrial process in which books are bought, scanned and destroyed. Cutting off the spines makes it quicker to scan the content before the pages are made into pulp. The full impact of this is yet to be understood.
The physical destruction of books is nothing new. The practice has been used throughout history to erase culture, rewrite history and intimidate populations. Booksellers from all over the world have been receiving large unusual book orders. In the article “Secondhand booksellers in UK and Ireland suspect AI firms behind ‘strange’ bulk orders” by Dan Milmo from The Guardian Newspaper ( August 15 2026) says that the tech companies prefer books published prior to 2022 as they know that the work was written without the use of chatbots. In fact the term used was that the work was not ‘polluted’. This could be interpreted as quite an indictment on the AI generated information.
There are many questions relating to authenticity, copyright and creativity when human authorship is mined. Many creatives are taking a stand by placing a No-Train or Exclusion Disclaimer on their material, so that their text and images can not be scraped or used for artificial intelligence training.
When the world is rife with disinformation and misinformation, access to accurate information is vital; one example of people being misinformed about facts, relates to our understanding about dinosaur behaviour. American paleontologist Jack Horner says that dinosaurs were probably vividly colored, danced, and sang, and were more like birds than reptiles. Dinosaurs aside, what happens when we are misinformed about a person, whole communities or world events?
AI is here to stay and many of your students will be using it extensively both in their studies and recreationally so how do educators deal with this issue in schools? All new tech is threatening, but the unknown abilities of artificial intelligence and the rapid development seem to be scaring even the experts. So many changes in society make it hard to predict accurately what skills students will need for the future, what is indisputable however, is the necessity to teach critical and creative thinking.
One way to bring Common Core and ISTE standards relating to evaluation, identifying false statements, validity and bias to life is to use our Harbord & Khan Visual Thinking Tools.
One way to bring Common Core and ISTE standards relating to evaluation, identifying false statements, validity and bias to life is to use our Harbord & Khan Visual Thinking Tools. For example, The Knowledge Twister Toolⓒ can be used with students to explore some of the different ways that knowledge can be manipulated for a positive or negative outcome.
Place your chosen fact or information (for example ‘Dinosaurs sang and danced’?) in the largest rectangle and ask students what impact the different verbs around it have on it.
Invert or Deepen: What happens to this knowledge if they invert or deepen the fact that ‘Dinosaurs sang and danced’?
If we invert the fact, we could say that dinosaurs didn’t sing or dance. Students could ask, ‘How would this impact dinosaurs and the world around them?’ Deepening our knowledge would mean we look more closely at the research and develop a greater understanding of particular information. From their experience of using the Knowledge Twister Toolⓒ students can identify examples of knowledge manipulation and the impact of this in their everyday conversations and interactions with their friends.
Paleontologist Jack Horner CAT (computerized axial tomography) scanned some dinosaur skulls, reconstructed the internal structures, and blew air into them virtually to work out the noises they might have made. More recently a new artificial intelligence DinoTracker accurately identified dinosaur footprints. Harbord & Khan believe a thoughtful approach to using AI that supports critical thinking can embrace the exciting benefits and opportunities it offers. Using The Knowledge Twister Toolⓒ and our other visual thinking tools, we can equip students to think critically and creatively to question what they know, make observations in real time and deepen their knowledge so they can differentiate fact from fiction.