Media

The story looks trustworthy. How do you know if it holds up?

Media, deepfakes and source tracking

Core

Information is now produced at industrial scale. Here you build a fake and then trace it, in order to understand what professional responsibility a journalist or a citizen carries.

Before you start

Before you start: the human anchor is about your thinking, not spelling, presentation or a perfect result. You may use dictation or speech-to-text if that suits you better, and it is fine to make mistakes. Choose an example you feel comfortable sharing. In the algorithmic pivot, you may use any AI tool; a free account is enough and you do not need a subscription.

Human Anchor

Write the first part of the project without AI. The goal is to create a human benchmark that can later be compared with algorithmic analysis. The text should be personal, grounded in your own experience, and detailed enough so that AI cannot simply replace it with a generic summary.

Choose a news outlet, a social media channel, or an information source that you use. Write about how you assess trust, what signs you notice, what makes you share, and when you have doubted a news story.

Scope

1,000 words minimum, unless the teacher decides on a shorter test version.
No AI, no automated rewriting, and no machine translation.
Use your own examples, your own words, and state clearly what you are unsure about.

Include This

What you know or think before the AI is introduced to the task.
What experience, memory, physical observation, or local knowledge shapes your perspective.
Which three questions you want the AI to challenge in the next step.

Assessment

The teacher does not assess whether the text is perfect. They assess whether the human voice, the student's own judgment, and real context are clear enough to hold up against algorithmic output later in the project.

Algorithmic Pivot

Have AI transform a mundane news story into an incremental fake: a headline, an image, audio, a video, or a social media post that maximizes anger, fear, or the click-through rate. Then ask it to analyze its own methods.

Fyrirspurn til gervigreindar

This is a ready-made frame to use in Step 2. It disciplines the AI by giving it a role, a task, constraints and verification questions, instead of a free-form chat. Copy it, try it, and adapt it to your own project.

Role

You are a critical assistant in the Tækniseigla category Media. You should expand the student's analysis without taking the responsibility away from them.

Task

Create a controlled information fabrication and perform a provenance audit on it.

Constraints

Do not publish or distribute the fake outside the educational context.
Clearly mark all generated content as exercise data.
Identify at least five traceable pieces of evidence that distinguish the real from the fake.

Verification questions

3 verification questions are included in the copied prompt. You answer them in step 3.

Fiduciary Anchor

The accountability document is the final gate of the project. Here you show that you can use AI without hiding behind it. All claims that survive in the final product require verification, a clear disclaimer, or a conscious rejection.

Debug the fake with fact-checking. In the accountability document you show how to trace the news back to original sources, visual material, a timeline, a location, and responsible editorial decisions.

1. AI Process

Document which tool was used, which prompts were tested, what changed between versions, and which parts of the output initially seemed convincing.

2. Verification

Use at least three independent pillars depending on the nature of the project: a primary source, official data, an academic source, your own calculation, physical testing, expert assessment, or comparison with human experience.

3. Errors and Blind Spots

Answer these questions:

What clues show the origin of the content?
Where does the AI use emotion to hide weak evidence?
What responsibility lies with the person who publishes, shares, or corrects?

4. Rejection

Name at least two points that you reject from the AI output. Explain whether they were incorrect, unproven, ethically weak, too general, or simply not in line with your human anchor.

5. Accountability Statement

Conclude with a short statement in the first person: what you take responsibility for, what you do not yet know, and what decision you would never delegate to AI.

Now it is your turn. The exercise is the bridge between step 2 and step 3.

Go to exercise

For teachers, competency line: Substrate judgment

That is the whole module: anchor, pivot, accountability. The work itself happens off this page.

Project packs that build on this module

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