THE QUESTION
Synthetic Witness examines how AI-generated conflict imagery affects three things at once: whether viewers judge an image as credible, how it moves them emotionally, and how it settles into collective memory. As synthetic media grows indistinguishable from documentary photography, the image's long-held role as witness is destabilized, with consequences for journalism, the historical record, and the politics of who gets believed.
WHY IT MATTERS
Photography has carried evidentiary weight for over a century: to see was to be able to trust. Generative AI severs that link. When a convincing conflict image can be produced without a camera, a place, or a witness, two problems emerge at once — fabricated images can be taken as real, and real images can be dismissed as fake. Synthetic Witness treats this not as a technical curiosity but as a crisis in how societies document violence and remember it.
Photography has carried evidentiary weight for over a century: to see was to be able to trust. Generative AI severs that link. When a convincing conflict image can be produced without a camera, a place, or a witness, two problems emerge at once — fabricated images can be taken as real, and real images can be dismissed as fake. Synthetic Witness treats this not as a technical curiosity but as a crisis in how societies document violence and remember it.
APPROACH
The project is mixed-methods. [It began as a survey-based experimental study measuring credibility judgments and emotional response to AI-generated versus documentary imagery, and has evolved into archive-navigation research examining how viewers move through and interpret contested visual records.] It draws on collective memory theory, Maurice Halbwachs on the social frameworks of memory, and Jan and Aleida Assmann on cultural memory, to ask how synthetic images enter, distort, or displace a shared historical record.
The project is mixed-methods. [It began as a survey-based experimental study measuring credibility judgments and emotional response to AI-generated versus documentary imagery, and has evolved into archive-navigation research examining how viewers move through and interpret contested visual records.] It draws on collective memory theory, Maurice Halbwachs on the social frameworks of memory, and Jan and Aleida Assmann on cultural memory, to ask how synthetic images enter, distort, or displace a shared historical record.
CASE STUDY: IRAN
[Iran's revolution serves as the grounding case.] The context matters methodologically as well as politically: working directly with Farsi-language primary sources and diaspora testimony allows the research to engage material often flattened or mistranslated in English-language coverage, and to examine how synthetic imagery interacts with an already contested visual archive.
[Iran's revolution serves as the grounding case.] The context matters methodologically as well as politically: working directly with Farsi-language primary sources and diaspora testimony allows the research to engage material often flattened or mistranslated in English-language coverage, and to examine how synthetic imagery interacts with an already contested visual archive.
RELATED OUTPUTS
Research poster — Synthetic Witness: AI and the Collapse of Collective Memory in Iran's Revolution — [Texas Tech Graduate Student Research Poster Competition]
Research poster — Synthetic Witness: AI and the Collapse of Collective Memory in Iran's Revolution — [Texas Tech Graduate Student Research Poster Competition]
Special Topics in Journalism: Legal and Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence & Media
