Case 04 — The image workup

Running a reverse image search and an automated detector on the same image, and taking their disagreement seriously

15 March 2027

Bring a laptop. This is the first fully hands-on session, and the tooling matters — you can’t reason your way to a verdict about pixel-level artefacts you haven’t actually looked at.

Before the session#

Nothing to prepare. Everything you need is provided in the session, on purpose: this is where “I would have checked that” turns into actually checking it.

In the session#

Working through a set of five images — some real, some synthetic, some real photos recirculated with false context — you’ll run a reverse search and a detector on each and log where they agree, where they don’t, and which one you’d trust more for that particular kind of forgery.

Afterwards#

Keep your log. Assignment 2, due in week 7, asks you to combine methods across weeks 3 to 7 on a mixed-media case, and today’s disagreement-tracking habit is exactly the discipline that assignment rewards.