Misinformation and disinformation are especially common during election times, and the spread of AI-created content — such as the AI-generated video of Jasmine Crockett and John Cornyn dancing — has only made it harder to discern fact from fiction.
At The Texas Tribune, we do not use AI to create news content. Our AI policy prohibits publishing news photographs or videos created by or manipulated by generative AI. In cases where AI-generated images are the newsworthy subject of a story, we clearly label them as such with a watermark and caption. Social media platforms do not have such strict rules.
Here’s what you need to know if you spot a suspicious image, video or audio about elections, particularly on social networks.
Check the source and the context
There is no one solution for identifying false media content, and sometimes we can’t be 100% certain something was generated by AI, but some well-established methods of information verification still hold true.
If authenticity is in doubt, a good first step is to look for the source.
That leads to some questions:
- Is the photo or video being shared with credit to a photographer or news agency?
- Is it from a credible news source?
- For videos, are there multiple angles of the event or similar footage from different news stations?
- Has the image or video been verified by experts?
If you don’t know where an image originated, you can run a reverse image search on Google. This shows whether it was previously published and whether reputable sources have confirmed its authenticity. For videos, you can run a reverse image search on a single frame in the sequence. Take a screenshot of the frame and use it in a reverse image search, just as you would with a regular image.
There are two ways to run a reverse image search. For images published online, right-click on it and select “Search image with Google Lens”. You can also upload the photo directly from your computer by going to Google.com and clicking on the camera icon. Google Lens also lets you search the entire image or just a portion of it. You can even copy text or translate a phrase directly from a photograph. Once a search is run, you can filter the results to see visually similar images or exact matches. This can help determine if the image was previously published on another website, if it was taken out of context, or if a real image was altered using AI. It also can help identify the date the image originally appeared. When reviewing results, it’s crucial to verify the legitimacy of all the sites that published the image or video. Some content may have been manipulated or taken out of context years ago, circulating ever since.
Context also matters. Were there news reports about the event depicted in the image or video? Is there a transcript of the audio published by a verified source? Would the politician publicly say what you heard in the viral audio? If you can’t find a reliable source to back up the image, audio or video, the recommendation is simple: don’t share the content.
There’s a lot more than that, so read the whole thing. There’s a section on AI-generated videos, too. I feel confident you will have at least one opportunity to swat down someone on Facebook or wherever this election season. You’ll never convince a true believer – and while I’d say there are more of them on the Republican side, this is definitely a bipartisan problem – but you ought to be able to keep a few normies from embarrassing themselves. It’s the Lord’s work either way, so be prepared.