Specialty centers · Synthetic Media & Provenance
Free journalism briefs about proving where a piece of media came from. Students carry provenance end to end through a real package and log every step that broke the chain, and they measure a detector honestly enough to report what it gets wrong about honest media. Every brief has its own PDF, and all twelve are in the bank PDF. No account. No student data leaves your school.
Consent, likeness, and claims
No synthetic likeness of a real person without specific written consent, and never a classmate, teacher, or public figure as a demonstration subject. Three claims are out of bounds: that a detector proves something is fake, that Content Credentials prove something is authentic, and that missing credentials mean something is fake — absence of provenance is the normal state of honestly shot media.
How to run one
Worked sample · printable PDF
Produce a short, publishable news or feature package — and carry provenance end to end, from capture through edit to the surface a reader actually sees. Then write the failure log: every step where the chain broke, what operation broke it, and what a newsroom would have to do differently. The clean package is the easy half. The failure log is the deliverable.
Featured · printable PDF
Take one publicly available synthetic-media detector and measure it against a ground-truth set you built. How often does it miss synthetic media, how often does it accuse honest media — and when does your own finding expire?
What does a recipient see at each step, and where exactly do the credentials stop existing?
Compliance and comprehension are different results — which one does your current disclosure achieve?
Map how synthetic voice is actually misused — impersonation of a source, a fabricated quote, a scam call to a family, a "recording" of something never said — and write the prohibition list your program will adopt. This brief produces no cloned voice.
Draw the editorial line between labeled satire and misleading synthetic media, then test your line on three headlines that sit right on it. A rule that only handles easy cases is not a rule.
Someone sends your newsroom a photograph or video of something newsworthy and cannot tell you much about where it came from. Write the intake checklist that decides what you do next — publish, hold, verify further, or decline — when provenance is incomplete, which is the normal case.
Take one real political campaign's approach to AI disclosure — what it did, what it was required to do, and what it said about it — and assess it against a standard you state first. Where the campaign disclosed nothing, that absence is the case.
Design the workflow that preserves provenance from shoot to publish in a program where equipment is shared, students graduate, and files live in four places. Then prove it by running a real story through it.
Draft the AI standards document your own newsroom would actually vote to adopt — including the part everyone skips, which is what happens when someone breaks it.
Argue the case that process controls — sourcing, custody, credentials, verification practice — should be a newsroom's primary defense, and detector scores at most a secondary input. Then argue the strongest case against your own position and say what would change your mind.
Your publication ran something with a synthetic or AI-assisted element it should not have, or described one wrongly. Write and design the correction. What does a reader need to see, where, and how quickly — and what does the newsroom owe the person who was wronged?
Six-dimension rubric
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