Regulating Reality: Exploring Synthetic Media Through Multistakeholder AI Governance

Artificial intelligence’s integration into daily life has brought with it a reckoning on the role such technology plays in society and the varied stakeholders who should shape its governance. This is particularly relevant for AI-generated, or synthetic, media, an emergent visual technology impacting perceptions of media as records of reality. Studying the stakeholders governing synthetic media is vital to assessing safeguards that help audiences make sense of content in the AI age; yet little qualitative research examines how actors from civil society, industry, media, and policy conceptualize, develop, and implement such practices. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing 23 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders governing synthetic media alongside real-world cases of multistakeholder synthetic media governance. Inductive coding reveals how temporal perspectives—spanning past, present, and future—mediate multistakeholder governance of synthetic media. Analysis also illustrates the critical role of trust, both among stakeholders and between audiences and interventions, as well as the limitations of technical transparency measures like AI labels for supporting effective synthetic media governance. These findings inform literature on multistakeholder AI governance through rare insight into such processes, while also supporting the practical design of synthetic media policy that serves audiences.