Spotting AI: Deepfakes, Misinformation & Verifying What Is Real

Synthetic media — images, video, audio, and text generated by AI — has crossed the line from obviously fake to routinely convincing. A cloned voice can imitate a family member from a few seconds of audio. A generated photo can pass at a glance. A fabricated quote can spread to millions before anyone checks. This is unsettling, but it is not hopeless, and it does not require panic. It requires a small set of durable habits.

This is a short, plain-language, non-technical course for the general public. It is honest about one hard truth up front: the AI-detection tools that promise to tell you real from fake are unreliable, and leaning on them can make you more wrong, not less. So instead of chasing tools, you will learn the things that keep working — checking where something came from, tracing a claim to its source, reverse-searching an image, reading laterally across sources, and using provenance signals like Content Credentials where they exist. You will learn the tells that still help with images, video, and voice, and just as importantly the old tells that no longer work. You will finish with a simple verify-before-you-share workflow you can run in under a minute. The field changes fast, so the focus is on durable skills over specific tools, with honest pointers to check current details yourself.