#388 AI Literacy and the Hidden Power of Digital Persuasion

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (0:00)

Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. Before we dive in, I wanted to personally thank you for listening. Many of the ideas we discuss on this show inspired my new book, AI Augmented Teams. If you're looking for practical ways to combine human expertise and AI to achieve better outcomes, I think you'll find it valuable. Learn more at padar.ai.books. That is paidar.ai.

Now, let's get started with the show.

Diego Bonilla (0:30)

Someone that arrives, he consults the books and the programming that I want them to learn, and they get specialized answers, and oh, the chat works. That is the typical use of a chat and it's not conducive. To the type of things that you and I are talking about, is very individual, is individualism.

What I attempted and it did work, more or less, I'm perfecting it, is everybody enters a communal chat.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (1:00)

Why this matters to you. AI is no longer just a productivity tool or a content engine. It is becoming part of the systems that shape attention, trust, privacy and decision making. For leaders, the real challenge is understanding how persuasion, personalization and platform incentives can influence people before they realize it. If your organization depends on digital channels, this conversation will help you think more clearly about literacy, risk and the future of human judgment. Let's get into it.

Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. This is Dr. Darren. On this episode, AI Literacy and the Hidden Power of Digital Persuasion with Diego Bonilla, Professor, CSU System from California State University.

Diego, welcome to the show.

Diego Bonilla (2:00)

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (2:03)

Hey, this is great to actually have someone that lives close by me, is a teacher, part of the CSU system. We're going to talk about AI's effect on education and things like that, higher ed. But before we get dive into all of that, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show.

Every superhero has a background story. Diego, I know your background story has got to be amazing. So let's hear your background. You do have an interesting background story. I know you do.

Diego Bonilla (2:37)

Let's see. I started a PhD in mass media, in mass, in public communications, with a specialization in digital media. And that carried research that was at the time very innovative, in which I tracked human behavior using an application. And from the tracking data, I was able to do inference on their cognition, in their cognitive processes when it came to how they acquired memory and well, that started my journey into a lot of things that I am doing today, including the awareness that how deep digital media is, when it comes to the understanding of people and the people who use it. The title of my dissertation is The Medium is the Measure of Itself. When I studied mass communications, most of the media was measured by Nielsen. There were completely different structures. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a very big business, obviously, mass media. And then everything, when I started my dissertation and I proposed that topic, I was pretty much telling everything that you need to know from your audience, including cognitive stuff, can be inferred just by the computer behavior, by the way they use the computer. And that got me really concerned. That got me concerned about how deep it was. It was, you know, to the level in which we would have many people being able to have this information about others and that information was not symmetrical. And therefore, there was a power relationship in there that bothered me. Whomever has this capability to draw inferences from human behavior using computers has extraordinary power over those who don't.

And that led me to start my entire career in literacy, in informing people about the type of things that happen when you use digital media, the type of crumbs that you leave behind, how they're used without your knowledge, often, most often without your knowledge, and most often for persuasive purposes. And that triggered an entire career in that regard. I started working around 2006 and 2007 at ETS, Educational Testing Services that does the GMAT and the GRE, all those exams. And they were preparing a test at that moment that it was, I believe, the iSkills exam. I think that I'm getting the name right. And they gather a lot of people from all over the country, I was one of them, to evaluate how well those rubrics were actually to the populations that we had. Later on, I was invited back again to Princeton to work on the rubrics themselves, to actually go into the, what does it mean to be digital literate, in the terms of like a citizen, like in skills and how I can protect myself and how I can use this information in society well, so I can do well too.