On March 19, the iSchool will welcome more than 200 Seattle-area high school students for “,” a daylong workshop on how to navigate the misinformation landscape from and , the faculty duo who created the “Calling BS in the Age of Big Data” class and .

“MisInfo Day,” will be from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Husky Union Building’s North Ballroom.

West is an iSchool assistant professor, Bergstrom a professor of biology. Their most recent creation is , a website that helps users learn to tell real from fake images online.

The students — many of whom are studying government — will come from Nathan Hale, Franklin, Bellevue and Toledo high schools. Discussions will include defining misinformation and why we find it so compelling as well as “tips and tricks” for determining if news reports and social media posts are legitimate

The afternoon session will be an “Ask the Experts” panel, where the students will hear professionals from the Seattle Public Library, Snopes.com and the 91̽»¨about their work. The students are asked to “come with questions about misinformation, fact-checking, confirmation bias and more.”

Other faculty and staff involved are:

• , iSchool assistant professor
• , 91̽»¨librarian who manages the Information Science collection
• , assistant professor in the Department
• , assistant professor in the
• Liz Crouse, one of several students involved from the iSchool’s Masters of Library Science program, who assisted West in coordinating the event and will conduct pre- and post-program surveys of students for an ongoing research project. Other MLIS students will lead breakout sessions during the event.

Bergstrom and West’s “Calling BS” work has drawn wide attention from press as well as other institutions, some of whom have already expressed interest in holding events modeled on “MisInfo Day.”

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For more information, contact Maggie Foote, iSchool communications director, at 206-250-5992 or m2foote@uw.edu

Go ahead, give it a try. Look closely, study the context and click your answer, choosing which of two realistic headshots is actually a real photograph — and which is complete fakery.

How did you do? Don’t worry — read the site, and try again.

is the new website from of the 91̽»¨ Information School and of the biology department, the duo who drew wide attention since 2017 for their innovative Information School class, “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.”

As with their Calling BS class, Bergstrom and West seek to address — and help people navigate — the increasing amount of misinformation and deception they see online. When the two saw the artificial intelligence-powered website — which renders extremely realistic portraits of utterly nonexistent people — they wanted to spread the word that the ability to generate believable, lifelike faces was now possible and proliferating online.

“We did not create the technology,” Bergstrom stressed. “We wanted to get the word out that this is now possible. Generally up to this point, we have trusted faces in photos: If it’s a photo, it’s a real person — at least up to this point.”

As Bergstrom and West explain on WhichFaceisReal, the “phenomenal” algorithm used to create realistic fake faces was developed by software engineers at NVIDIA Corporation and uses what is called a General Adversarial Network, where two neural networks “play a game of cat and mouse,” each trying to create artificial images and the other trying to tell the difference. “The two networks train one another,” they write. “After a few weeks, the image-creating network can produce images like the fakes on this website.”

And as with their Calling BS work, the website was immediately popular, with about 4 million “plays” of the game in about two weeks.

Are people guessing well? Mostly, yes, West said. Overall, so far, about 70 percent of players choose correctly when trying to distinguish fake from real — and the site may be helping them learn to do better.

“In our initial analysis this appears to be the case, but we need to verify this with more rigorous analysis,” West said. “We’re also looking into what kinds of images are the most difficult to discern. For example, are fake images of younger or older people more difficult to identify?”

There are a few hints and “tells,” however, that help one choose more wisely. Bergstrom and West offer advice in a tab on their site labeled “learn.” Look for inconsistencies in the background of the photo, or how the hair or eyeglasses are rendered.

And there is what they call the “silver bullet” to know fakes online: The algorithm used, called , is unable to generate multiple fake images from different perspectives of the same faux-person. So their advice is, to verify, look for a second photo of the same person.

Or as Bergstrom said, “How do you know if your next Tinder match is real? See if he has a nice headshot as well as a nice shot of himself petting a tiger. Always look for that tiger photo.”

West and Bergstrom plan to continue adding features to their site to add to the challenge of choosing between real and fake — they may remove backgrounds (which are among the “tells”) to make the choice harder, and will be asking users to view a single photo and say whether it’s real or generated.

“We want to bring public awareness to this technology,” said West. “Just like when people started to realize that you could Photoshop images, we want the public to know that AI can replicate human faces.

“That will hopefully make people start to question things they see in different ways. It will hopefully force us all to corroborate evidence even when we see a photo that looks human.”

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For more information, contact West at jevinw@uw.edu or Bergstrom at cbergst@uw.edu.

The class was conceived and is taught by iSchool assistant professor with biology professor . It’s a one-credit course offered through the iSchool as INFO 198 but listed also in the biology department, as BIOL 106B. The class will meet on Wednesday afternoons, with its first session on March 29.

When registration opened, the class reached its 160-student ceiling within one minute, like a rock concert selling out.

Each session will take up a different topic related to, well, BS. As the online shows, West and Bergstrom will start with definitions and “spotting BS,” followed by a session on “the natural ecology of BS.” Subsequent topics include causality, statistical traps, big data, publication bias and predatory publishing, fake news, and the ethics of calling and refuting BS.

In a lengthy online , the instructors say the class is not about any one party or politician — despite being “particularly timely today” — and will not seek to comment on the current political situation in the country or the world.

“This class is about how to spot bullshit and how to call it. It’s not about cataloguing all the bullshit out there, telling students what we think is bullshit in contemporary science and society, or calling bullshit on the most egregious cases,” said Bergstrom.

Examples to be used in class, he said, are those “that serve a pedagogical purpose” by showing ways BS is spread and demonstrating effective ways to refute it. Basically, they say, the course is about how numbers, statistics, data visualization models and algorithms are increasingly used for propagating BS, and how people can detect and it and avoid being taken in.

West and Bergstrom plan to hold a three-credit version of the class in fall quarter.

And though the class is for 91̽»¨students, Bergstrom and West plan to edit their lectures into video clips and make them publicly available on the UW’s YouTube channel.

“We don’t care whether our students agree with our world views,” Bergstrom said, “but we do want them to have the skills to see through nonsense, form well-founded beliefs based on evidence and make their best arguments for those beliefs.”

West added, “Now, we need to make sure it as fun as a rock concert.”

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For more information, contact West at 206-543-2646 or jevinw@uw.edu, or Bergstrom at 206-685-3487 or cbergst@uw.edu.