This week, more than 100 students from four districts learned how to identify genuinely fake news — including pieces generated by endlessly deceiving and constantly evolving artificial intelligence — during an annual student journalism summit at Butler County Community College.

Students from Butler Area, Seneca Valley, Knoch and Pine-Richland school districts learned to identify fake, viral information and AI-generated photos, and to understand the emotions that make people vulnerable to misinformation. Keynote speaker Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project led the sessions on fact-checking and media literacy.

These are skills that all of us would do well to develop, as being tricked by videos made to look and sound like people in powerful positions is not something that only happens to the very young or very old. Carefully crafted misinformation — that which is created with the intent to mislead for various reasons — can be nearly impossible to distinguish from real news without putting in some research time.

It’s a shame that we’ve reached this point as a society. Technology used to be something that gradually enhanced our lives over time and, generally speaking, streamlined difficult tasks and improved things that were previously more difficult. In many ways, advances in tech can still be like that. Unfortunately, we all know that it can also be used to fool us at times.

Constant misinformation has put news organizations in a difficult position and news consumers in a tough spot, as well.

It’s made it more difficult for those who consume news to trust anything they read or see. It’s more likely people will question legitimate news as a result.

It’s also created an unfortunate side effect in which readers and viewers will not trust any updated versions of news stories that differ from the original reporting, thinking the news source deliberately lied or misled them initially. As the world of news has gotten more fast-paced, there has been a shift toward focusing on being first to post a story, often before every fact is known. When journalists learn more information about the story and update it to reflect that, some people immediately become distrustful of that new information.

In the age of misinformation, that mistrust is entirely understandable and we as journalists are always looking at ways to combat it. We’re also always open to helping people learn how to distinguish real information from fake news.

One easy tip is that if a story seems outlandish, extreme or a little “too much,” do a quick internet search to see where else the story appears. If it doesn’t appear on the website of any legitimate news source, it’s probably fake news. Similarly, if you see a story that seems extreme and see that the site it originated from is not a trusted news source, that’s a good reason to research that story a little more.

It’s unfortunate that we have to do any of this. It puts an unfair burden on journalists and on those who consume news in all its formats. But it’s important to all of us, as Americans, that we’re able to know the truth about what is going on in our country and the world around us.

We should, and can, work together to make that as simple as possible.

— KL