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.

I've been experimenting with 3D reconstruction from archival photographs for the past year at Spatial Lab, and when we started in early 2025, I wasn't sure high-quality single-image-to-3D was even possible. Gradually I developed processes with diffusion models that created convincing 3D scenes from 2D images, but they were painstaking manual processes that took hours to complete. Now, with Apple's SHARP, there is a fast, opensource, image-to-3D process freely available.

At Starling Lab, we've been prototyping what we call a "nutrition label" for synthetic media, intended to be a standardized way of communicating what audiences are actually looking at. After months of experiments and dead ends, here's where our thinking has landed.

The Distributed Press Clone API successfully preserved a decade of Harvard Public Health journalism, preserving the entire site on IPFS and Hypercore for permanent, resilient public access.

Starling Lab co-hosts 'Entering a New Era of Human Civilization' at Stanford with HAI and FSI. Featuring Craig Mundie, Thomas Friedman, and John Hennessy, the event explores the intersection of AI, journalism, and history. Learn how cryptographic data integrity and technical frameworks are essential for verifying facts and restoring trust in the digital age.

For over 180 years, photographs have served as evidence. A photograph was understood to be a mechanical recording of light that existed in a specific place at a specific time. In other words, proof of the existence of an object or event. This evidentiary assumption underpins journalism, law enforcement, insurance claims, scientific research, and countless other domains. With the advent of AI-generated synthetic imagery, that assumption is now obsolete.

Tracking the illicit flow of cars from Europe to Russia, reporters found their sanctions-evasion scheme was a red herring: a sophisticated scam targeting Russians, complete with deepfaked videos and paid actors.

Preserving 'digital twins' of endangered Armenian cultural heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh for 20 years on the decentralized USC Filecoin Node.

A mock trial at Inner Temple tests new standards for authenticating open-source material – and reveals what happens when cryptographic metadata meets centuries-old legal tradition.

Our new CAR Content Locator solves the challenge of tracking individual files in large archives across Filecoin and IPFS networks.

With US leadership waning and AI technology advancing rapidly, international legal scholars gather at Leiden University to draft urgent guidance for judges confronting synthetic evidence.

Our contribution to the UN Special Rapporteur's report to the Human Rights Council

From cryptographic proofs to newsroom policy—key takeaways and speaker highlights from our recent event on campus with Stanford HAI

Takeaways from our international law and technology experts roundtable at Georgetown, with Hala Systems and the U.S. State Department’s Office for Global Criminal Justice.

Discover how the Public Records and Human Rights Conference at IPFS Camp 2024 brought together experts to discuss decentralized technologies for data integrity and human rights protection.

We’re focusing on Authenticated Attributes, a new initiative to enhance the authenticity and trustworthiness of digital media using cryptographic tools. This novel backend, featuring Hyperbee, supports verification workflows and authenticated metadata storage, aiding journalists and legal investigators in working with verifiable data.

Insights and Discussions on Ensuring Authenticity in Digital Evidence

Addressing the risks and solutions for authenticating open-source imagery in the emerging age of synthetic media.

Explore the importance of trusted timestamping in verifying data authenticity, integrity, and the timing of digital signatures.

Starling Lab and Hala Systems offer to the UN OHCHR a decentralized approach to sharing evidence, the “Index for Accountability.”

Our joint submission to the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine includes evidence of displacement of Ukrainian children as well as an original nuclear monitoring dataset.

Mom, I See War (MISW) is the first known digital archive to document the way children experience war by preserving high-resolution jpeg scans of their drawings and metadata about the drawings. MISW has a collection of 10,026 single-image assets from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which Starling Lab has registered on the NEAR blockchain and archived on distributed web protocols.

Preserving digital evidence for the long term using ledgers

The "New Frontiers in Evidence" conference at the Inner Temple brought together leading experts to discuss the challenges and advancements in the use of user-generated evidence in legal contexts. Highlights included keynote insights from Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat and sessions on digital evidence authentication, ethical considerations, and innovative investigative methodologies.

A new report, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council, cites work of the Starling Lab for Data Integrity and Hala Systems as an emerging good practice to protect the universal right to education.

Ahead of a DFRLab report studying pro-Kremlin news articles, we preserved this evidence base for later review and potential accountability. This archiving run tested the scale at which we could forensically preserve web pages.

Screenshots aren't enough. Secure court-ready web evidence with verifiable metadata, hashing, and an unbreakable chain of custody.

The testimony of a primary observer’s supervisor could help bridge the evidentiary gap. Supervisory testimony would consolidate the institutional knowledge of the chain of custody of specific pieces of digital evidence in a single person.