Holding the Line – Authentication, Verification, and the Fight for Facts in the AI Age

Paper by Hilke Schellmann et al: “Almost anything can now be generated with artificial intelligence: photographs, audio, video, documents, entire websites. As synthetic content becomes cheaper and more convincing, and as verifying what we see online grows harder, how do we sustain an information ecosystem in which facts can still be established and trusted? In this report, we identify the challenges brought to the information ecosystem by the increased accessibility of generative AI. We start from the premise that verification, authentication, and transparency are key pillars of online information integrity. We then describe how this emerging ecosystem challenges the trustworthiness of facts from the perspective of information producers, consumers, and intermediaries. Next, we turn to a discussion of potential interventions that can address the challenge of AI-mediated information integrity. These interventions are not exhaustive, but they represent the issues raised by participants drawn from a cross-section of journalists, researchers, and technologists who participated in an in-person workshop held at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early June 2026. This report is intended to serve as a bridge across different actors in this complex information ecosystem: newsroom engineers, investigative and open-source reporters and editors, verification tool builders, independent journalists, policy makers, researchers, and media platforms. We aim to surface the primary challenges — and imagined interventions — to work towards a more resilient information future together”