In October's episode of Show & Tell, we spoke to Shayan Sardarizadeh about his approach to debunking viral fakes for the BBC Verify service.
"I want to check everything for AI," he told us. "I don't care where it comes from. If it comes from a national TV, if it comes from a politician posting it on their official TikTok, I don't trust anything."
Sardarizadeh covers disinformation, conspiracy theories and AI, and is a prolific poster during breaking news events. Improvements in AI generation have made it much harder for him to tell whether an image is synthetic by studying its details. He now relies primarily on AI detectors (especially the ones based on SynthID), and a lot of reverse searching.
He walked us through an example where using both these methods was essential to definitively prove that a viral image showing Donald Trump kissing a young aide was indeed fake.
The first version Sardarizadeh ran through OpenAI’s detector did find the SynthID watermark, and the image even had the now-rare artifact of AI generation in the form of a six-fingered hand. But a grainier version of the image was also circulating with some online commenters claiming that was the authentic version that had been subsequently enhanced with AI. Because this second image did not return indicators of AI use, he worked his way through pages of reverse-search results and landed on the oldest known version from a YouTube thumbnail. Pairing that with a near-identical image that did return an AI watermark, he was finally able to definitively debunk the story.
This is a good example of how repeated resharing on social media can still degrade watermarks and make detectors provide a false negative result. (Indicator tested several free detectors provided by companies with an AI generator and found similar results.)
You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel.
Sardarizadeh told us he doesn’t have a single monitoring stack during breaking news but tends to focus on the platform that he knows is most relevant based on the region or story: Telegram or VK for Russia/Ukraine, Instagram for Gaza, and so on. He builds a grid of every version of a clip with platform, link, screenshot and timestamp and reverse-searches everything without exception at least twice. We also discussed the responsibility to carefully pick what to fact-check so as not to unnecessarily amplify it.
In the lightning round, Sardarizadeh site: as his favorite operator and said he’d revive CrowdTangle, which makes him our third guest this year to ask for it back.
About Show & Tell
Show & Tell is a monthly podcast hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
We talk about digital investigations with leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and trust and safety researchers. We aim to be as practical as possible by having our guests walk us through one or more investigations or analyses they actually worked on.
This is our ninth episode. Our previous episodes featured:
Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown.
Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta, investigative reporters at The Wall Street Journal.
Hal Triedman, a privacy and security researcher at Cornell Tech.
Omer Benjakob, disinformation and cyber reporter for Haaretz.
Barbara Marcolini, visual investigator with Amnesty International's Evidence Lab.
Kolina Koltai, senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat.
Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of Maldita.es.
Jeff Horwitz, investigative reporter for Reuters.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the conversation with Shayan. Catch every episode by subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Email us.
