A new child safety campaign is putting real actors and AI-generated characters side by side, challenging Australian school students to work out which faces are human and which have been cooked up by technology.
And if early feedback is anything to go by, telling the difference is proving rather difficult.
Created for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s annual Australia’s Biggest Child Safety Lesson, the ‘Question Everything’ campaign aims to teach upper primary students, educators and parents to think critically about what they see and hear online.
The campaign deliberately blurs the line between reality and artificial intelligence, placing real actors alongside synthetic characters before revealing which ones were never real.
The AI characters then deconstruct on screen, showing students exactly how easily digital content can be manipulated.
AI production studio FOURTHE partnered with production company Tide Productions and the Daniel Morcombe Foundation to bring the synthetic characters and scenes to life.
According to the Foundation, early feedback suggests very few viewers have been able to identify the AI-generated elements correctly – a finding that reinforces the campaign’s central message: don’t automatically believe everything you see online.
“The gap between synthetic media and reality has closed much faster than most people realise,” said Nick Kelly, executive producer at FOURTHE.
“Working in this space day to day, we see that firsthand. Without that awareness, it’s very easy for people to be misled.”
Tide Productions’ creative producer Lauren Panrucker said making the AI elements difficult to distinguish was essential to the campaign’s success.
“It was really important to us that the project included AI to show technological credibility. The AI elements needed to blend flawlessly into the rest of the production – if the audience could spot it, the core educational lesson would be lost,” she said.
For the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, the goal was to give children realistic examples of synthetic media in a safe, guided environment, rather than simply tell them AI exists and hope they understand the risks.
“Children encounter AI-generated media every day, often without realising it. To build their discernment, we needed to show them realistic examples in a safe, guided setting,” said Amanda Swanson, educational resources project manager at the Foundation.
There were also strict safeguards around how the synthetic characters were made. No real child’s face or voice was fed into an AI model, with every character created from written descriptions and approved by the Foundation throughout production.
The lesson is available to primary schools, educators and parents nationwide through the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s website.
And if adults are struggling to tell the difference, it might be time to pay attention to what the kids are being taught.
