Like most of us (I think), I feel two ways about AI: excitement and fear. 

I love that it’s accelerating the pace of scientific research, and that—in my lifetime—we could find meaningful treatments, therapies, and even cures for devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS. 

I don’t love that it’s covertly coordinating security breaches without humans’ knowledge. Really don’t love that. 

This week, in the spirit of measured distrust, we hear how a little training can go a long way to distinguish between real and AI-generated images. Matt Groh, a Kellogg professor of management and organizations, takes us through that research. 

Then, we learn how successful parents can prevent entitlement in the next generation. 

From duped to disabused

Groh and his colleagues knew from previous research that a little training improved people’s proficiency at spotting AI-fakes. But they saw room for improvement, especially for professionals like intelligence analysts who handle sensitive, high-stakes work on a daily basis. You wouldn’t, for example, want them to authorize a drone strike without just cause if they fail to correctly screen a fake image that suggests a terrorist is in a particular location.  

The researchers worked with intelligence analysts from various U.S. agencies who write daily briefs for the president and other senior White House officials. The team first asked the analysts to classify 40 images as real or AI-generated on a customized web interface. 

As a whole, the analysts correctly identified 73 percent of the images, close to the level of accuracy that Groh’s team had found in their previous study of regular people.

Then Groh presented a 30-minute training slide deck to the analysts about how to distinguish real from AI-generated images, after which the analysts repeated the online classification exercise on another set of 40 real and AI-generated images.  

After the training, the analysts’ accuracy increased to 82 percent—a bump of 9 percentage points. And the participants’ ability to accurately classify both images in a pair, such as the real and fake images of an astronaut, improved by 11 percent.  

The analysts’ improvement was mostly driven by a 14 percent increase in accuracy at identifying real images. Or put another way, the training helped reduce the analysts’ false positives.   

“We helped them better identify real images as real, which is actually the hardest thing to do,” Groh says. With an AI-generated image, you can be confident it’s fake once you spot the artifact, but “a real image is something that has the absence of artifacts.”  

This skill is critical, because without it, people may favor believing that images are fake by default.

“It’s possible to get better,” Groh says. “We’re not doomed not to be able to tell real from fake.”  

Read more in Kellogg Insight. 

Successful parent, entitled child? 

In his 20 years of teaching family enterprise, Matt Allen says he’s observed one fear dominate all others for parents: entitlement. 

It’s not inherently wrong to want to spend the spoils of your success on the future of your children, says Allen, the John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises at Kellogg. But problems arise when parents’ efforts focus on the outcome instead of the process. 

“If parents are not careful, hiring tutors, coaches, teachers, and consultants or buying travel experiences and other luxuries can lean toward ‘purchasing success’ rather than setting children up for opportunities,” Allen says. 

Allen provides several interrelated ways to embrace growth—and not just the outcome. 

A key component of his advice is to help the next generation embrace uncertainty and the idea that they might fail. 

Life is meaningful when we begin without knowing the end, Allen says. Hard work often leads to more-desirable outcomes, sure, but it’s also important to live with the idea that they may fail, anyway. It takes grit to tolerate that uncertainty.

“Embrace the process that leads to success, as this will create a growth mindset and sustainable capabilities that will pay dividends well into the future,” Allen says.

Read more at Inc., and learn more of Allen’s lessons from family businesses at Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor
Kellogg Insight