Lab Activities, Summer 2026
A short summary of what we've been up to recently
From the classroom to the courtroom, our focus remains on authenticity-by-design. We bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and applied practice, whether by training the next generation of integrity-focused engineers at Stanford, providing expert guidance on digital evidence, or scaling our data preservation efforts with our partners the USC Digital Repository.
The landscape of digital truth is shifting rapidly, marked by new platform-level cryptographic standards, mounting regulatory mandates, and an increasing reliance on decentralized storage solutions. In this issue, we highlight how Starling Lab is navigating this evolution – from our work preserving threatened cultural heritage in Armenia and Namibia to our collaboration with global media partners on end-to-end provenance pipelines.
Stanford Spring Quarter Class
Our Spring quarter edition of the Designing for Authenticity class wrapped up successfully at Stanford. Engineering students moved past theory to build fully functional, end-to-end capture and verification pipelines.
The object of the class was to think about integrity, authenticity, and truthfulness from end to end in the pursuit of documenting the Japanese-American incarceration camps in the US during World War II. Students mixed primary sources and virtual reconstructions from 3D Gaussian Splats and cutting edge world models to create novel virtual experiences of storytelling.
Don’t miss our guest dispatch by Riana Pfefferkorn, Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), on the topic of deepfakes in the courts; and David Rosenthal’s own blog about addressing the class.
The other top speakers this year were Jacobo Castellanos from WITNESS, Nathan Freitas from the Guardian Project, and Adam Rose, senior fellow of the Lab.
Ecosystem Growth International Events
In April, we traveled to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival. There, we co-hosted a side event and participated in a panel on bridging journalism and justice by preserving and verifying documentation of atrocity crimes. We also delivered the closing keynote at the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference in Brussels.
Our colleagues from Hypha Coop represented the Lab at the Atmosphere conference, focusing on the ATProto ecosystem, and the IPTC Media Provenance Summit, demonstrating the continued relevance of our work.
Lab’s Law Program Director Basile Simon finalized a hands-on chapter for the upcoming Exposing the Invisible book series. The practical guide provides step-by-step documentation for investigative journalists looking to generate and verify cryptographically immutable metadata using Proofmode, Save, and the C2PA tooling.
Our preservation work with the USC Digital Repository continues to expand. We have been supervising data ingestions from the TUMO collection in Armenia, and supporting the ongoing progress of Forensic Architecture’s Namibia work in the public realm: at their latest exhibition at Spores in Berlin, we placed a flyer informing the visitors of the preservation of the material, in partnership with representatives from the Nama and Oveherero peoples.
Finally, we are also currently working on aligning our current prototypes with the newest Content Credentials Conformance Program and Trust Lists. To achieve this, we are surveying and integrating specialized signing APIs from conformant platforms like Trufo.ai (US) and Valid GmbH (Germany).
Things we’ve seen
Our ongoing technical monitoring highlights a shift toward platform-level cryptographic adoption, legal enforcement deadlines, and defensive posture changes:
ProofMode x DiVine: A new partnership with the Jack Dorsey-backed DiVine social network leverages mobile cryptographic metadata collection to verify and support genuinely “human-made” media on distributed networks.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer: Directly addressing the core theme of the Lab’s web-archiving research, Automattic and the Internet Archive launched a free WordPress plugin to dynamically repair broken outbound hyperlinks using Wayback Machine snapshots.
Bellingcat on Disinformation Alternatives: Founder Eliot Higgins publicly emphasized why playing a purely reactive game of “whack-a-mole” with individual pieces of disinformation is a losing strategy.
Midnight Network Programmable Privacy: Developed by Input Output Global (IOG) – a core research partner of Starling Lab – the Midnight Cardano partner chain demonstrates real-world selective disclosure and zero-knowledge cryptography. This infrastructure is highly relevant for safely publishing sensitive legal evidence or whistleblower testimonies without exposing underlying private identities.
OpenAI’s Layered Content Credentials: OpenAI rolled out a combined implementation pattern deploying standard C2PA cryptographic metadata directly inside consumer-facing media generation outputs.
Google’s Deep C2PA & SynthID Integration: Google has integrated automated modification checking mechanisms across Gemini, Search, and Chrome, alongside scaling imperceptible SynthID watermarking on over 20 billion images to act as a resilient backup when standard metadata is stripped.
Policy Mandates (The EU AI Act & California AI Transparency Act): Approaching legislative deadlines are forcing commercial generative AI vendors to inject standardized disclosure icons and metadata hooks into all synthetic media offerings.
Time Magazine’s Historic Recreations: Time Magazine drifted into the “uncanny valley” with its On This Day 1776 short-form historical series, utilizing generative AI imagery to reconstruct American revolutionary history in a pristine, pristine fashion – highlighting the potential of the techniques, and the malaise this kind of historical record might trigger.