Week 1 Set: The specimen shelf

First set — bringing in a real AI-generated video, sorting it by eye before you have the vocabulary to sort it properly

22 February 2027

The screening’s last slide asked you to find one AI-generated video already circulating and bring the link. This session is what that homework was for.

Before the session#

Have the link ready — a URL you can play in the room, not a saved clip and not a description of one. Screenshots don’t move, and slop’s tells mostly live in the seams between frames. If you can’t find one in five minutes of looking, you weren’t looking in the right feed; ask a classmate where they found theirs.

In the session#

Round one — show and place (25 min). Everyone plays their clip for the room, thirty seconds each, no commentary yet. As a group, sort the pile into rough stacks by resemblance — not by category anyone’s named for you, just “these two feel like the same kind of thing.” Expect disagreement about where a clip belongs. That disagreement is the data.

Round two — name what you can (20 min). For each stack, try to say what the family resemblance actually is, in your own words, before next week hands you the vocabulary for it. Write these working names on the shelf next to the clips — you’ll compare them against the formal tell-vocabulary in week 2 and see how close an untrained eye gets.

Round three — start the shelf (15 min). The specimen shelf is a shared, running catalogue that the whole course adds to: this week’s clips are the first entries. Log each one with its link, your working name for its stack, and the one sentence from the spec above. You’ll pull specimens back off this shelf in week 2 (formal tell annotation), week 6 (the Slop Teardown), and again in week 9.

Afterwards#

Nothing here is marked on craft or on being right about a category — the set is checking that you showed up with a real artefact and can defend, in one sentence, why it belongs in this course rather than in a general “AI is bad” pile. Vague answers (“it just looks fake”) get sent back for a sharper one on the spot.