Lab Activities, Winter 2025
A short summary of what we've been up to recently
As the winter of 2025 gave way to the early months of 2026, Starling Lab moved from a period of intense technical development into a season of significant global influence and policy leadership.
The Reality Collapse: Certainty as the Premium Product
In an AI-polluted media landscape increasingly defined by what we call the “reality collapse,” our work this winter focused on moving beyond mere prototypes to establish “certainty as the premium product.” This effort was perhaps best articulated by Adam Rose in his recent op-ed for Poynter, where he argued that the existential threat of AI is not merely the content it generates, but the resulting systemic collapse of trust in all digital information.
This philosophy of “Authenticity by Design” is our north star, guiding our contributions to international human rights frameworks and the future of investigative journalism. This vision was further articulated in Basile Simon’s 2026 prediction for Nieman Lab, which noted: “If confusion is the commodity, certainty is the premium product.”
The Lab on the International Stage
The Lab continues to bridge the gap between deep tech and global policy through high-level convenings. In collaboration with Stanford HAI, we recently co-sponsored an event featuring Tom Friedman and Craig Mundie, which served as a vital forum for discussing the geopolitical implications of the current AI revolution.
Ann Grimes recently delivered a talk at the Stanford Symbolic Systems Forum (SSP), outlining the foundational principles of Starling Lab and our “Authenticity by Design” framework to a cross-disciplinary audience of technologists and researchers.
Basile Simon has spearheaded several key initiatives:
His submission, on behalf of the Lab, to the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism was formally cited in their position paper.
A piece for OpinioJuris titled “When Tech Disrupts Faster Than Rules Adapt,” providing emergency guidance for handling AI-affected evidence, in collaboration with our colleagues from the Fénix Foundation, and following our summer 2025 gathering in The Hague.
Contributed to the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) Digest, using accessible analogies to explain how a decentralized web of trust can safeguard against digital authoritarianism.
2026 Global Roadmap
On the international stage, the Lab is preparing for a series of high-profile engagements that place our tools in the hands of those on the front lines of justice. At the upcoming International Journalism Festival in Perugia, we will take part in a panel on preserving digital evidence alongside partners from Airwars and Global Rights Compliance, moderated by Frederik Obermaier of Paper Trail Media.
We will then take to RightsCon in Lusaka, Zambia where, in partnership with the Guardian Project, we will lead a workshop session on authenticity tools and capturing authenticated media, including a paper prototyping of provenance UIs workshop.
We were also delighted by the decision of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) to elevate our upcoming session on the various practices of web archiving to the closing keynote of the annual web archiving conference, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium.
Preserving the Digital Record
As we look toward the rest of 2026, our focus remains on ensuring that the digital record—from oral histories to social media captures—remains verifiable, immutable, and resilient. Our most recent effort in this direction is the preservation of several terabytes of 3D scans of heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh at risk of degradation, through the lab’s data preservation efforts and collaboration with the USC Digital Repository and Libraries.
Things we’ve seen
Camera Bits’ Photo Mechanic support for C2PA integrated into the verification process for Olympic photography.
Time Magazine plummeted into the “uncanny valley” with unsettling historical recreations using generative AI.
The launch of the AP Verify dashboard, providing a bouquet of verification tools for reporters.
The problematic use of AI to “unmask” and “enhance” crime footage by home sleuths.
Meedan’s brand evolution and the introduction of Suwali, an AI-powered tool designed for public interest.
The Internet Archive’s WordPress plugin aimed at automatically solving the problem of link rot.
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins on why “playing whack-a-mole” with disinformation is a losing strategy.
ProofMode’s new partnership with the Jack Dorsey-backed DiVine social network to support “human-made” content.
High-stakes instances of government-led image manipulation and archival blurring.
Technical horizons in privacy with Midnight, a new partner chain for selective data disclosure.
With gratitude,
Basile Simon and the Starling Lab team
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