After several days of school closings or two hour delays due to weather, some parents worried it would happen again after a post was circulating online. It turns out the post was fake and generated by AI.
Brad Whitman, the Executive Director of the Tri-county Intermediate Unit saw a post online stating several schools in the county were canceling school over the next few days. It turns out the information was false.
The post online may look familiar. It’s very similar to one of our own graphics at Erie News Now that our First Warning Weather Team uses. Our Erie News Now post will always have the first warning weather logo and you should always check to see if it’s on our facebook page too. The post making its rounds online is AI generated, but fake with information from last year, but it still caused stress for parents and school district officials
As Whitman explained, “The most recent post, we actually had someone try to recreate it using AI and when they put it in AI, it actually pulled the information from a news article from a year ago.”…