The new TikTok trend “AI Homeless Man Prank” has sparked a wave of outrage and police responses in the United States and beyond. The prank involves using AI image generators to create realistic photos depicting fake homeless people appearing to be at someone’s door or inside their home.
Learning to distinguish between truth and falsehood is not the only challenge society faces in the AI era. We must also reflect on the human consequences of what we create.
As professors of educational technology at Laval University and education and innovation at Concordia University, we study how to strengthen human agency — the ability to consciously understand, question and transform environments shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic media — to counter disinformation.
