Pulitzer Center Update November 21, 2025
Now Available on Demand: The AI Spotlight Series
Learn From the AI Spotlight Series Anytime, Anywhere
The Pulitzer Center is excited to announce that we’ve launched a free version of the AI Spotlight Series online.
The AI Spotlight Series is a set of trainings designed to equip reporters and editors of all beats with the knowledge and skills to cover artificial intelligence with nuance and impact.
When the AI Spotlight Series began in 2024, with Karen Hao as the lead curriculum designer, the goal was to reach 2,000 people over two years. We’ve trained nearly 3,000 journalists and editors in seven languages, but we know that demand is not slowing as AI continues to penetrate more of our personal, civic, and work lives.
The online curriculum will allow anyone interested in AI accountability—journalists, editors, students, and civil society groups—to learn at their own pace from Hao and other coaches. After going through the sequence, participants will also have the opportunity to apply to join a growing community to continue learning through a listserv and regular community calls.
We are publishing the curriculum under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, so we also encourage people to build on the curriculum and adapt it for their communities. We are hopeful that this new version of the curriculum will make our core training program more accessible and flexible as we continue to develop the curriculum with new modules in 2026.
We will still organize sessions with our coaches over the next year for those who want a more interactive experience or learn from new modules in development, such as one on data center reporting. You can learn about upcoming sessions on our AI Spotlight Series information page.
If your organization is interested in a private session with our coaches, with the option to personalize the training, please reach out to [email protected].
Let us know what you think. The curriculum is evolving, and we’d love to see how you’re using and building on it. Also, look out for Spanish, Portuguese, French, and bahasa Indonesia versions of the curriculum over the coming weeks and months!
Best,
Impact
AI Accountability Fellow Sofia Schurig’s reporting revealed how generative AI tools are misused to create and distribute child sexual abuse material. Her investigation documented the mechanisms behind this abuse, showing how AI models are trained on openly available images and videos of children, often scraped from the internet without consent, and then used to produce both AI-generated and real-child abuse content. Reporting identified 14 Instagram accounts distributing illegal material, which Meta subsequently removed.
Now, Brazilian officials have taken down a foreign website selling deepfake images used to produce child pornography. A statement by Brazil’s Advocacy-General of the Union said the action followed an extrajudicial notice from the National Prosecutor’s Office for the Defense of Democracy, “based on an investigative report by Núcleo Jornalismo in partnership with the AI Accountability Network of the Pulitzer Center.“
Read Schurig's full investigation here.
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