News & Media

We are delighted to announce that Fred Grinstein has joined Starling Lab as a 2026 Fellow, where he continues his research at the intersection of documentary practice, generative AI, and media authenticity.

AI is now embedded across the non-fiction content ecosystem: in historical documentary broadcast series, festival films, independent shorts, and throughout the contemporary creator economy spanning YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and other social video platforms. What was once speculative has become common practice. The question has shifted from whether these tools belong in documentary to how they are being used, by whom, and with what kinds of disclosure and care.

The discomfort many of us are experiencing now is not simply about fake videos. It reflects a growing awareness that the infrastructure we assumed was holding non-fiction media together may never have fully existed. What sustained trust instead was a fragile system of consensus built from institutions, conventions, and shared habits of interpretation. It went unexamined because it worked well enough.

I fed a 1930s Dust Bowl photograph of migrant workers by Dorothea Lange into the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s Project Genie and within seconds I was walking around inside it. A shack lay ahead. I turned around and the scene behind me (a scene that doesn't exist in the original photograph) was already there, rendered in dusty period-accurate detail, all in keeping with the source photo.