Synthetic media, AI and deepfakes continue to advance in their realism, ease of creation and accessibility. While AI was not the pivotal factor in global elections in 2024, significant audio, image an...
Sam Gregory
Sam Gregory is an award-winning human rights advocate and technologist, and an expert on innovations in preserving trust, authenticity and evidence in an era of increasingly complex audiovisual communication and deception. He has testified to both the US House and Senate on AI, deepfakes and media transparency and is a TED speaker on how to prepare better for deceptive AI.
In 2018, he initiated the Prepare, Don’t Panic initiative at the global human rights network WITNESS, focused on deepfakes and multimodal generative. This globally focused effort grounds these technologies in the realities of frontline journalists and human rights defenders, and has directly influenced platform policies, emerging technologies for trust such as the C2PA, legislative efforts and public discussion of who and what to prioritize. Currently, WITNESS leads the only global Deepfakes Rapid Response Force - connecting frontline journalists to media forensic experts to detect deceptive AI or claims of its usage used to challenge authentic content.
As Executive Director of the human rights network WITNESS, he leads their strategic plan to “Fortify the Truth,” and champions their global team who support millions of people using video and technology for human rights and civic journalism. WITNESS received the inaugural Peabody Global Impact Award in 2024 for “media or organizations that have profoundly changed the world for the better” and for its work “tirelessly championing the power of emergent media technologies in defense of human rights around the world.”
Sam served on the ICC Technology Advisory Board and co-chaired the Partnership on AI’s Expert Group on AI and the Media and the Threats and Harms Taskforce of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Widely quoted in the media he has also published in WIRED and The Hill. He taught the first course at Harvard on participatory media and human rights from 2010-18, and in 2024, he completed his PhD at the University of Westminster, which focused on participatory media, AI, and trust.
Events IJF 2025
Deceptive AI video: what to know about creation, usage, guardrails and regulation
2025 is the year of widespread generative AI video. Six months after the wider launch of OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 2, and as the ability to create, edit and use generative AI video grows in r...
Four months into an omnibus election year and the ongoing generative AI revolution, what are the realities of how journalists are encountering the use of deceptive generative AI audio, video and image...
Newsrooms will soon have a menu of options on applying content credentials to their work. But what do newsrooms need to consider before applying this technology to their work, and how will it affect a...
Deepfakes: what journalists and the media need to know, do and demand to prepare better
Yes, hype around deepfakes and other synthetic media manipulation is extensive. But there is also an underlying reality that technology trends combined with trends in weaponization of media indicate t...
Deepfakes! As more sophisticated, more personalized, more convincing audio and video manipulation emerges how do we get beyond apocalyptic discussion around malicious deepfakes and other AI-manipulate...
Photos
Photos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).