ROTC students are helping the military defend against AI deepfakes
By Hope Hodge Seck
Dec 31, 2025, 04:07 PM
Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Escandon poses for a photo alongside newly commissioned officers from Syracuse University’s ROTC, May 9, 2025. (Pfc. Abigail Stewart/Army)
An image shows a column of fire and billows of deep black smoke in the aftermath of a bomb blast in downtown Kiev. A news story purporting to be from CNN raises alarm about a rash of drone sightings causing community panic in Syracuse, New York.
Aside from their plausibility in changing and uncertain times, what these media reports have in common is that they’re totally fake: computer-generated products of the Synthetic Media Lab at Syracuse University.
The school doesn’t use these deepfakes to deceive the American public, as many hostile foreign actors seek to do; they use them to build tools that will help organizations including the U.S. military to distinguish truth from hoax. And they’re doing it with the help of some of the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets.
For the school, the work dates back to 2020, when the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications got an $830,958 subcontract agreement from DARPA to develop tools to combat the spread of fake news. Since then, the work has expanded and continued, though faculty members said they couldn’t provide many specifics on the scope of their work or the DoD entity they were supporting.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2025/12/31/rotc-students-are-helping-the-military-defend-against-ai-deepfakes/
