Deepfakes and Information Literacy: Implications for the Emerging Role of Academic Librarians

The emergence of deepfakes challenges the traditional assumptions underlying information literacy because authenticity can no longer be established through conventional evaluation of source, appearance and audiovisual evidence alone. Consequently, academic librarians must expand information-literacy instruction towards synthetic-media literacy, verification, provenance assessment and critical evaluation of AI-generated content. The paper addressed this issue by examining the challenges deepfakes pose to conventional information-literacy practice and the implications for the emerging role of academic librarians. It discussed how deepfakes undermine traditional authority cues, complicate source corroboration, make authentic information difficult to distinguish from synthetic content, and expose limitations in existing information-evaluation practices of users. The paper further considered the evolution of information-literacy practice from source-centered approaches of CRAAP test towards SIFT and lateral reading, and established that these approaches, although valuable, may not sufficiently address the authenticity problem created by synthetic media. It proposed an expanded information-literacy practice incorporating synthetic-media awareness, provenance tracing, verification, contextual analysis, triangulation, AI literacy and critical judgement. The paper concluded that academic librarians should be repositioned as mediators of trust, verification and critical information judgement within contemporary academic information environments through curriculum integration, institutional partnerships, verification-tool training and continuous professional development in AI and synthetic-media literacy.