PDA Event: AI-Generated Images – What’s Really Real? Strategies for Teaching Critical Inquiry through the History of Synthetic Media

This session offers a hands-on, historically grounded approach to teaching with and about synthetic media, tracing the long history of image manipulation from spirit photography to deepfakes to build critical media literacy. Participants will examine archival photographs, test their verification skills, and fabricate their own fake historical images using prompts and open-access collections. Along the way, we’ll address the ethical stakes of misinformation, the limitations of conventional “spot the fake” strategies, and how well-meaning detection methods can sometimes reinforce ableist assumptions about the human body. This session shares both practical tools and approachable frameworks that librarians can use to engage others in meaningful analysis of AI-generated images.

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Hosted by ASERL