A new picture card is pinned to the mission control board.
It shows a fluffy orange cat sitting on a gray crater, with Earth glowing behind it.
"A cat on the Moon!" Rocket shouts. "We have to tell everyone on the station!"
Raven leans in and frowns at the card. "What do you notice? There is no caption. Nobody signed it. Where did it come from?"
Nova hovers beside the board. "It looks real," she says. "But looking real and being real are two different things."
Rocket lowers the card slowly. "So how do we find out which one it is?"
"That," Raven says, "is this week's mission."
In Week 8 you learned that generative AI makes new, synthetic content.
That content can be images, videos, audio or text that imitate the data the model learned from.
Some synthetic content is made to look or sound real.
A deepfake is synthetic audio or video, or a photorealistic image.
Photorealistic means it looks like a real photograph.
The cat card is invented for our story. No real cat has sat on the Moon.
| Kind of content | Example (all invented and harmless) |
|---|---|
| Photorealistic image | A photo-style picture of a cat on the Moon |
| Synthetic video | A clip of a dog skating along the rings of Saturn |
| Synthetic audio | A recording of a parrot reciting the planets in order |
| Synthetic text | A news-style paragraph about a comet shaped like a rubber duck |
| Statement | True or false? |
|---|---|
| A deepfake can be audio, video or a photorealistic image. | ? |
| If a picture looks real, it must be real. | ? |
| Generative AI makes content that imitates the data it learned from. | ? |
| Synthetic content can only be text. | ? |
Good start, explorer. Tomorrow you learn two words for false content and why small changes matter.