everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: tools

  • Honing Your AI Spidey Sense

    Honing Your AI Spidey Sense

    A checklist to help you spot AI-generated misinformation

    Going through some papers from this year’s Online News Association conference in Atlanta, I found this handout put together by the folks at Verify.

    I couldn’t find any reference to it online so I thought I’d post it here for posterity.

    Images

    • Zoom In! Look for distorted details
    • Textures: Too smooth or unrealistic?
    • Face/Body Features: Hands, Feet, Teeth, Ears
    • Analyze intricate images (ie. Flags, Paintings)
    • Look for repeating patterns
    • Analyze shadows
    • Depth of field issues
    • Remnants (Extraneous pieces of data)

    Audio

    • Too pristine
    • Voice doesn’t make common sounds (um, uh, like)
    • No ambient background sound
    • Voice mispronounces common words
    • Voice is flat/unemotional. Doesn’t take breaths

    Video

    • Voice Doesn’t match mouth movement
    • Subject’s movements unrealistic
    • Background too static
    • Subject is not in proportion to other elements
    • Glitches in the movement

    Journalism

    • Go to the source: Who’s named in the content?
    • Credits: Who posted it, who is credited as the photographer?
    • Reverse image search to look for similar posts
    • Do other credible reports exist?
    • Does the context make sense?
    • Is this realistic
    • Google it!
    • Who could benefit/be harmed by the claim?

  • Walkin’ NYC

    Walkin’ NYC

    Did I mention that we’re walking the streets of Manhattan in order to get to know the neighborhoods? I use this iOS app called Trails to track where we go and then trace it old skool style with a sharpie onto a tourist map.

    Log of our stroll on Sunday
    Total log of walks since we arrived
    Trails keeps track of our walks automatically.

    The nice thing about Trails is that it automatically logs everywhere we go so I can just put the phone in my pocket and go about our day. The location tracking doesn’t take as much battery on my iPhone XR as I thought but I do bring along an extra charged up external battery to top things up just in case.

    One app that I also recommend is Urban Archive. They have a database of all the old buildings in NYC and using it, you can quickly lookup the history of buildings you see while walking around.

    Here’s the master map with all the traces of where we’ve been so far since arriving on September 25th. Lots to still see (we’ve only spent a short time in Brooklyn) but it’s been a blast.

    If there are particular walks you recommend, please add links in the comments!