Learning to foil images: avenues for the teacher

Manipulating images, easier than ever! Soon it will likely be quite commonplace. This also poses a major challenge for education ...

“Smile! "

This is the instruction that is generally given to people before photographing them to have a good photo. It may not be necessary soon. We can make the subject of the photo smile even if he was not smiling at the time of the click!

This is what offers Smile Vector, a computer robot that automatically transforms photos to make people smile. You have to see it to believe it.

Other companies are working on even more advanced algorithms, such as Face2Face, which will be able to move someone's face and lips in a video, so that it looks like they're saying something other than the words they actually spoke.

Developing critical thinking is more important than ever to help children decipher their media environment. It was also referred to in Learn to distinguish the true from the false, November 25. But what happens when you can no longer even trust the images?

There are of course all kinds of software (still quite complex) to identify certain image manipulations, even very subtle ones. But for now, the most important thing is probably to make young people aware that it is not possible to believe everything you see - as they already know that you should not believe everything you hear. , all we say.

Raise awareness using Snapchat

As young people are, for the most part, familiar with the communication application Snapchat, one way to make them aware of the issue could be to ask them, as a first step, to explain the functioning of fun filters that the application has managed to popularize. This real-time image modification technology (which the Messenger and Instagram applications have also recently adopted), is effectively based on the development of artificial intelligence, just like SmileVector and Face2Face.

We could then point out to them that while we can add fanciful hats to pictures so easily or make faces make faces at pictures. selfies, we could certainly also make more subtle, even imperceptible, changes and make the image tell a whole different story than reality ...

Questions to ask students

- Do you believe that it is possible that images are manipulated today in war zones? To influence public opinion? And closer to us could that be done too? For what other reasons?

- What tells you that the photo which is published in the newspaper this morning is true? What about the one a friend sends you on Facebook?

We could also make them discover, thanks to these examples, that if image manipulation is easier and more frequent than ever, it has been around for a very long time!

The exercise could continue by suggesting that the young people try to fake a photograph themselves. And why not, make an exhibition with all the images for the benefit of the other pupils of the school.

We could also educate students' eyes by making them, more simply, analyze these photos collected by Bored Panda, in order to find the trick that made them so amazing.

Because the most important thing is to know how to outsmart the image.