See where every item came from.

When you finish an edition, every item is revealed as Real or AI. A real item names its source and license. A synthetic item shows the prompt that produced it.

• Real

  Source and license, named.

• AI

  The prompt that produced it.

Real items come from three places.

• The Metropolitan Museum of ArtMuseum open-access collection
• UnsplashStock photo library with a permissive license
• The Internet ArchivePublic-domain audio archive

Every real item carries a license from our allowed list: public domain (including Internet Archive recordings), a museum open-access release, Creative Commons CC0 or CC BY used under its terms, or the Unsplash License. The reveal credits the source, and gives attribution wherever a license asks for it.

If we ever license work directly from photographers, voice actors or writers, we will credit them by name here.

Synthetic items are generated with current AI image and voice models, each from a written prompt. The puzzle teaches the medium, not just the answer.

We keep an internal record of which model produced each item, for our own accountability, but we do not publish the model name. Showing the prompt makes the process auditable.

We do not generate synthetic items that depict identifiable real people. We do not generate synthetic items depicting public figures in defamatory or misleading contexts.

We do not include in any edition:

• AI generations of identifiable real people, such as public figures in fabricated situations
• Items pulled from copyrighted sources without license
• Sexually explicit content
• Graphic violence or gore
• Hate speech or content that demeans individuals or groups
• Content depicting children in any context that could be exploitative
• Misleading or deceptive AI generations of real news events
• Material that would be illegal to display in our or our users' jurisdictions

These exclusions govern which sources we use and how we write prompts. They are not an item-by-item screen: the checks that actually run on each item are listed below.

Spotdle is fully automated. Software assembles each edition, following rules for sourcing and licensing.

Trust in the product comes from the reveal, not a manual sign-off. Every real item's source and license, and the prompt behind every synthetic item, are shown to the player at the moment they see the answer, so the reveal itself is the check.

Software checks each candidate item before it can be used in an edition:

• Every candidate must carry a license from our allowed list, plus attribution text where the license requires it. Candidates that fail this check are rejected.
• Museum works are used only when the museum marks them as public domain.
• Unsplash searches use Unsplash's own content filter at its strictest setting.
• Model and prompt logging is required for every synthetic item (the prompt is shown at the reveal; the model is kept as an internal record).
• An edition only draws items of its own kind (images for an image edition, voices for a voice edition).

Unsplash's filter is the only automated content screen. No software check tests each item against the exclusions listed above.

Independent. Operated from Ontario, Canada.

The Spotdle website itself was built with the help of AI coding tools, and editions are assembled by software. A product about identifying AI should not pretend it was made without it.

Questions about a source or a call? Contact us