Activity: Lie Investigation Algorithm

The goal of this exercise is for you to familiarize with and present basic concepts surrounding inappropriate dissemination of information and to ideate ways to address it. This is a team assignment and should be at least 3 or 4 slides and which you will share with the class.

How to detect a lie

Part 1

Consider the following situation. As a Professional Software engineer and member of society, you are fed up with mis/dis-information rampant in your day-to-day news feeds. You are approached by the CTO of your company and are asked to lead this new business unit and asked to develop an AI that can "investigate/detect lies".

First you assemble a team to investigate and answer the following questions (capture these as a team on a google doc for later submission) :

What are the concepts and primary differences between "Misinformation" and "Disinformation"?
What are the most common areas/domains where the spread occurs and what tools are used? How has this changed over time?
Research the web and find one example of each of the above type of information that has been spread in relation to artificial intelligence (and/or software and the computing industry if you can't find specifics). Don't rely on just one article, try to find evidence that the "lie" has been widely disseminated.

Part 2

Read Additional resource first (Chomsky 10 Strategies of Manipulation and Media Literacy Basics)

Now that "You are becoming an expert on this subject".. it is time to create the lie investigation algorithm for the AI. The objective is to generate a set of steps that would be followed by an intelligent system in order to fulfill, at minimum the following:

Detect whether a lie exists
Whether a lie is being actively propagated
Whether the lie is purposedly being propagated
If the lie is a combination of lies
If a lie has changed over time
If there is a compelling "truth" that debunks the lie
Add any other pertinent aspects you see fit.

Try to be creative about this. You can start with an outline but eventually a diagram should be drawn on the board.

Submission Instructions

Submit your slides as (PDF) document to the myCourses Activity folder "Lie Investigation Algorithm" by time indicated. You will be presenting to your peers during class.