News & Events

We welcome Dr Sophie NightingaleLink opens in a new window on Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 (week 8), 12-1 in S0.18. Sophie completed her PhD in Psychology at Warwick and is now a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. The title of her talk is “The Gen-AI Generation: How worried should we be about the democratised ability to generate synthetic content?” Refreshments will be provided and Sophie’s talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Abstract: The advent of generative AI has taken the ability to generate fake content to a new level, and is changing the way we live. In 2018 Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) started to become popular for image synthesis, but the more recent emergence of increasingly powerful diffusion models has since democratised access to content synthesis—allowing almost anyone to create diverse images, audio, and video via simple text prompts. Generative AI can have positive uses but inevitably invites nefarious exploitation, with harms including political disinformation, financial fraud, catfishing, and the creation of sexual digital forgeries (SDF). In this talk I will discuss my research examining: 1) the realism and trustworthiness of faces generated using GAN and diffusion models; and 2) human use of guidance information from (purportedly) either an AI algorithm or a group of human experts when completing simple decision-making tasks. Findings indicate that AI-generated faces are highly realistic and more trustworthy than real ones, and that AI-derived guidance may be uniquely placed to engender biases in humans. I will also discuss plans to develop a system to detect SDF that will be codesigned with the police, charities, and survivors of SDF-related crimes.

On Monday 1^st December (week 9), 4-5pm in SO.11 we welcome Professor Yvonne McDermott Rees, Professor of Law, and Dr Maryanne Brassil, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, at Swansea University, who will speak about “Trust in User-Generated Evidence: Insights from the ECR-funded TRUE ProjectLink opens in a new window.” This will be followed by aQ&A. 

Abstract: Information recorded by ordinary citizens on personal devices plays an increasingly important role in accountability processes. Across the world, advances in mobile phone technology and internet access mean that millions of important photographs and videos depicting mass human rights violations have been, and will continue to be, created and shared online. Yet, at the same time, the public is increasingly confronted with examples of deepfakes and synthetic media, which are only likely to become more widespread, advanced, and difficult to detect as the technology progresses. Much of the literature to date has expressed a concern that the rise in deepfakes will lead to mass mistrust in user-generated evidence, and that this in turn will decrease its epistemic value in legal proceedings and human rights accountability processes. This may well be the case, but no study has yet empirically tested that assumption. This lecture outlines some of the key findings to date from the TRUE project, a large multi-disciplinary project, which seeks to address this important evidence gap.