The world seems to be staring at a looming truth crisis as generative artificial intelligence becomes bigger, and better.

Misinformation and disinformation through text-based AI models was bad enough, the problem is compounded when AI generated images too come into play.

Just so that you know, misinformation is false or inaccurate information, which simply means that the facts are wrong. According to the America Psychological Association, disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead-intentionally misstating the facts.

While trained fact checkers can spot things like super smooth skin or the outline of the eyes of a subject in an image, it is difficult for the common person to spot these differences – leading them to believe an AI generated image that they may see on social media.

The text to image model outputs are hyper-realistic, creating a scenario where it is increasingly becoming difficult to make out which image is AI generated and which is not.

Fact-checking is the only way out to deal with this crisis. But there seems to be a systemic issue as a massive army of fact checkers that are needed to tackle misinformation and disinformation is clearly missing.

The Google News Initiative India Training Network is a great initiative. But is that enough? To their credit, these fact checkers are superb and are doing a yeoman's service.

The process to separate the chaff from the grain, in this case, spotting fake news, misinformation and disinformation must start young.

So, I looked up the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, 2023. I could not find any reference to strengthen the student’s knowledge about fact checking – something which each student will need as they grow up.

Perhaps, it is not available at the school level, so I looked up the National Education Policy, 2020. There too I could not find any reference to fact checking. Do correct me if I am wrong.

One does feel concerned that as artificial intelligence becomes stronger day by day and its impact is felt in our lives, the battle against misinformation and disinformation seems to have been made the responsibility of just the trained fact checkers, most of whom having a journalism background.

Where does that leave the millions and millions of content consumers who continue to be inundated with text and images, without knowing it is misinformation and disinformation or not.

It is time for updating our education system so that the fight against misinformation and disinformation can be started right from the school/university level. It has to be a concerted effort.