Don’t Fall for Fake News Hype about Micro-Credentials
With plenty of high quality content at our disposal, be careful not to share low quality content
A reputable organization whose newsletter I rely on for valuable professional content about micro-credentials shared this article: The Declining ROI of MBA Degrees and the Rise of Altnernative Skill-Building Platforms.
The article has some great points in it that rhyme with facts, trends, and popular opinions I’m seeing in the innovative credentials space. I was particularly intrigued by a data point I hadn’t seen before:
A 2024 survey by LinkedIn revealed that 68% of hiring managers now value micro-credentials as equally as traditional degrees for technical roles
Luckily, the article has a hyperlinked citation at the end of the sentence. Unfortunately, it just links to hbs.edu/mba, the landing page for the MBA program at Harvard Business School. Regardless of any healthy skepticism readers may bring to that esteemed institution’s research, the citation seemed unfairly misdirected to this landing page rather than a study about the survey or the LinkedIn survey itself.
People make mistakes. Who hasn’t pasted the wrong url into a link field?
People make mistakes. Who hasn’t pasted the wrong url into a link field and sent it without first checking that it was the correct address? I’ve made this mistake almost as many times as I’ve typed “see attachment” and then forgotten to attach any file to the email.
So, I figured I’d message the author to request their source, and to suggest they update their article with the correct link. Like most online publications, the author’s name, Eli Grant, was hyperlinked to their bio page. Unlike most publications I’m used to however, this one didn’t provide me with the author’s email, LinkedIn, or Twitter profile:
Eli has a name. Eli has a profile pic. Eli has hundreds of followers. Eli has what I thought was a job title, however Eli’s biography reveals that “AI Writer” is not a job title: it’s Eli’s identity.
Get Noah Geisel’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
As in, Eli is an AI that is authoring content.
The bad link for the website citation wasn’t Eli making a simple human mistake that any of us could have made, because Eli isn’t human. And, as far as I can tell, Eli’s very legitimate-sounding LinkedIn study from 2024 is not legitimate.
Eli was hallucinating. And the org I trust for curating and sharing news (that I often then share in turn) featured the content that proved to put the “artificial” in “artificial intelligence.”
What frustrates me about this is not that people are populating entire websites with unreliable news that nonetheless looks like reliable news. In a world filled with people seeking to fulfill their own confirmation bias on an internet that awards advertising dollars to websites that can attract visitors who arrive to destinations that serve them what they seek, I’m more inclined to tip my hat than I am to blame whoever created this website.
Eli’s content proved to put the “artificial” in “artificial intelligence.”
It’s not AInvest.com’s (yes, Eli Grant authors content for a place that is literally called AInvest) fault that people with doctorate degrees passed along Eli’s hallucinations, allowing the social capital of their organization’s brand to validate and legitimize it.
What frustrates me is that it was not necessary to share fake news about micro-credentials. There is real news that is both factual and very close in detail to this fake story. The risk of sharing Eli Grant’s dubious content is that it distracts from the worthy advances in credential innovation by making the narrative to be about fake news instead of credential news (or, worse, to be yet another story that focuses attention on catastrophizing artificial intelligence rather than the story itself).
When it comes to the movements and communities dedicated to credential innovation, we don’t need people to fall for fake news hype about the advances and progress being made because there is an abundance of high quality and factually true news to offer them! This stuff is all about the power of trusted recognition to empower and enable human connections. And while AI has a huge role to play, let’s be careful not to outsource the most human roles and responsibilities in fostering trust in our vision for the future.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click to 👏👏👏 and recommend it to others! If you have thoughts to share about this, I hope to learn from your own response post!
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium you can find him on LinkedIn. Some other posts you might like:
