Hany Farid, a trailblazer in the field of digital forensics, was awarded the 2025 McGuire Family Prize for Societal Impact on Feb. 27 and said he sees room for both safety and innovation in artificial intelligence.
The $100,000 prize, established through a gift from Terry McGuire, Thayer ’82, and Carolyn Carr McGuire, Tuck ’83, recognizes Dartmouth community members who are making a significant positive impact on humanity, society, or the environment.
“As an academic, you hope that you’ll have an impact—trying to affect society and bring about global change, and asking, what can we do to help? I was always motivated by that. So, receiving an award for societal impact is truly rewarding,” said Farid, who served on the Dartmouth faculty for 20 years before moving to University of California Berkeley in 2019.
His research uses computational and mathematical techniques to identify if an image, audio, or video has been altered, providing the essential tools needed to distinguish truth from machine-made fiction in an era where digital content can be easily and convincingly manipulated.
“The McGuire Prize celebrates those who aren’t content to lead from an ivory tower but feel an obsessive need to make society better,” President Sian Leah Beilock said in her remarks at the award ceremony, held at the Hanover Inn.
Farid’s work serves as a modern blueprint for the kind of foundational leadership that created artificial intelligence 70 years ago at Dartmouth, President Beilock said. By pairing scientific rigor with a steadfast commitment to the public good, she said, Farid embodies the very values the prize was designed to honor.
Beilock also saved a surprise announcement for the end of the evening: Farid, who is known for his talents as both a teacher and a scholar, is returning to Dartmouth’s faculty in July.
“He’s going to be instrumental in pushing us forward—both on the research front and in helping us develop great humans who can lead in an AI-centered world,” she said, welcoming him back.
Barton McGuire ’08 talked about the crucial, wide-reaching impact Farid’s work is having, one of the things the McGuire Prize honors and celebrates.
“In a world that is increasingly flooded by deepfake photos and videos, a world that is swimming in false or unverifiable information, we risk losing our most basic commonality: a shared perception of reality. If our minds are consistently fed manipulated, contrived, or fabricated media such that we can no longer agree even on what we can see and hear, then how can we hope to agree on anything else?” said McGuire.
He also noted he wants to help teach his two young sons to recognize “what is real and what is fake,” and “to help them know who and what to trust.”
“For my part, I feel better for my sons, and for all of us, and all of our communities, knowing that the work Dr. Farid is doing and the field he is forging is making sure that we can still have trustworthy information and with it a common understanding,” McGuire said.
Earlier in the day, Farid delivered a lecture charting his professional trajectory from the early days of detecting digital manipulation to the escalating arms race against deepfakes today.
When Farid arrived at Dartmouth as an assistant professor of computer science in 1999, the internet was still young, and image tampering relied on manual tools like Photoshop. He worked on decoding the digital fingerprints inherent in every image, developing tools that could identify the subtle computational “tells” when any image is altered.
It wasn’t long before this research transitioned from the lab to the real world, redefining the standards of evidence in the digital age, providing federal law enforcement and the judicial system with the means to authenticate digital media for use in court.
The tools he built during his tenure at Dartmouth—most notably PhotoDNA—now serve as the global standard for civil authorities, media outlets, and tech giants alike.
But the landscape has since shifted, with generative AI making it possible for anybody to churn out doctored content—not just images, but audio and video—that can be distributed instantly online and made viral via social media.
Farid’s mission to combat fakes continues through GetReal Security, a platform that uses advanced computer vision and AI to analyze subtle biological and physical inconsistencies in AI-generated media. The tool provides a critical defense against the rising tide of digital fraud.
While the technology industry has produced phenomenal innovations that have changed our world in many positive ways, they have been cavalier with safety issues, Farid said during the Q&A that followed his talk.
“I reject this notion that we either have innovation or safety,” he said, “and I know I’m right because we have both, even as we innovate in medicine, travel, and electronics.”
“There’s real, measurable harm to individuals, organizations, societies, and democracies, and we don’t have a habit of holding big tech accountable for the harms yet,” he said, calling for regulatory measures and guardrails that could mitigate potential harm and an early introduction to digital literacy and critical reasoning in schools.
Farid stressed the importance of a liberal arts education at this time. “While a lot of what we do is technical, it spans everything. You’ve got to be able to think broadly about policy, about economics, about society, and about technology,” he said.
Farid was quick to underscore the community behind his innovative research, crediting the students, staff, and administration whose collaboration supported his work. “It’s easy to pick a person to give an award to. But the reality is, you don’t do this alone,” he said.
Also returning to Dartmouth with Farid is his wife, Emily Cooper, who will join the faculty as an associate professor of cognitive science. Currently an associate professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley, Cooper studies the mechanisms of human visual perception, specializing in the perception of three-dimensional space.
Farid said he looks forward to returning to Dartmouth, which offers more opportunities to engage closely with students in the classroom and the lab.
“There are not a lot of institutions like Dartmouth that operate at the highest levels from the teacher-scholar model,” Farid said.
At a moment when AI is poised to impact personal and professional lives, he said, “we have a responsibility to society and to our students, and this is the type of place where we can really lead thinking about the future of higher ed.”
