11How should I use it?

Real or Fake?

One of the two is real. The other one was made by AI.

Pick the one you think is real.

Round 1 was easy. The dog face was not even there.

How about round 2? You probably missed one or two.

Both machines do the very same thing. Only one thing is different. How many pictures they saw. Two thousand, and eighteen thousand.

That is why your eyes alone are not enough. Today's clue is gone tomorrow.

When you see a picture, ask this. Where did it come from? Who put it there?

A little deeper

For grown-ups, and for children who want more.

How convincing a fake is depends on model size and how much data it saw. The two rounds here show that difference directly.

Round 1's machine ran 12,000 steps on 2,059 dog photographs from Pexels. The results do not even read as dogs. Round 2's machine is the one from chapter 1, which saw 18,000 character pictures — close enough to fool a person. They do the same job. Only the amount differs.

Watch out here — if the child gets a few right in round 2 they may finish with "I'm good at spotting fakes." That is the opposite of the lesson. Missing one or two of the twelve is the point.

The rule to leave them with is not blurry means fake. That flips within a few years. What has to survive is the habit of asking where it came from — "where did you see this? who posted it?"

Try together — write down one clue the child found today, then ask "will this clue still work next year?"