How Do We Know What We Know II

Kate Crawford’s concept of “AI slop” names something we have all encountered but lacked the vocabulary to describe: the flood of low-quality, AI-generated content that is displacing human-created media across the internet. Crawford frames this not as a quality problem but as a metabolic one — AI systems consuming existing culture and excreting degraded versions of it at industrial scale. The press pieces on AI-generated imagery in the Iran-Israel conflict and AI-fabricated videos of Gaza bring this directly into the territory of this course, demonstrating how generative AI is already being weaponized in the information wars of the Middle East. When AI-generated images of atrocities circulate alongside real documentation, the epistemological ground shifts beneath everyone’s feet.

This session also features brief student presentations sharing emerging research directions. How does the proliferation of AI-generated content change the evidentiary standards for journalism, human rights documentation, and historical research? What does it mean for truth when fabrication becomes cheaper than documentation? And how do we develop critical literacy for a media environment where seeing is no longer believing?