Who’s Who of Information?

A Design Fiction Role-Play on AI, Media Production and Information Quality

Thibault Philippette (UCLouvain)

Concept

This activity invites participants to explore how trust in information is built, challenged, and negotiated in an AI-mediated media environment.
Through a role-playing simulation, participants adopt different producer or consumer roles and engage in a collective investigation of online messages. The experience highlights how intentions, biases, and values shape media discourse and how AI tools can amplify or obscure them.
The subsequent debriefing phase is central: it encourages participants to reflect on their perceptions of credibility, the non-neutrality of information, and the importance of identifying the intentions behind media messages.
Ultimately, the activity fosters critical awareness and informed trust in digital communication ecosystems integrating AI tools.

Priority

Priority 1: Reflecting on AI’s Positive and Negative Roles (Media Production): Understanding how AI reshapes information creation, credibility, and control.
Priority 2: Addressing AI-Generated Biases and Ethical/Deontological Implications (Media Reception): Examining the biases and ethical limits of AI-mediated communication.
Priority 3: Developing Skills as a Critical AI Prompter (Production and Reception): Learning to question, guide, and interpret AI systems and outputs critically.
Priority 4: Evaluating Audience Perception and Awareness (Media Reception): Observing how participants perceive and emotionally react to AI-driven information.

Objectives

Reflect on the dual impact of AI in media production: between empowerment and distortion.
Recognize and analyze intentions, biases, and ethical implications in AI-assisted information flows.
Develop critical prompting and interpretation skills, both for creating and decoding AI-generated content.
Strengthen participants’ ability to evaluate trustworthiness and transparency in media ecosystems.
Encourage ethical awareness and reflexivity about human–machine collaboration in information processes.

Target group

Educators, media literacy practitioners, researchers, and higher-education students (age 16+)
Adaptable for teacher training, academic workshops, or blended learning settings.

Modalities : steps and instructions

Step 1 – Introduction

Facilitators introduce the context: “Information Quality in the AI Era.” Participants are split into two groups:

Media Producers (receive secret personas and instructions)
Media Consumers (observe, react, and analyze posts)

Step 2 – Production Phase

Each producer posts short messages (≈5 lines) on a shared discussion space (forum, chat, or online board) following their persona’s strategy. Some use AI tools to generate or illustrate their posts.

Consumers read and react in real time.

Step 3 – Interaction Phase

Consumers evaluate credibility, bias, and source quality, comment on posts, and try to guess the identity behind each message. Collective interpretation emerges.

Step 4 – Revelation Phase

Producers reveal their identities and strategies. Each explains how and why they used (or misused) AI.

Step 5 – Debriefing and Reflection

Educators guide a discussion connecting the simulation to real-world media environments:

What strategies felt convincing or misleading?
How did AI influence perception of credibility and emotion?
What does this reveal about our own reactions to AI-generated or human-made content?

This phase is essential to transform the experience into a discussion on trust, bias, and responsibility in AI-mediated communication.