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AI Photo & Video Guidelines

Using AI To Create Photos and Videos

AI tools can speed up early work on a project: placeholder images for wireframes, rough visuals to pitch a concept or quick storyboards before a video shoot. For published work, AI has a narrower role. You may use it to edit real photography and video, and to generate a few approved elements such as abstract textures. It cannot replace real imagery or video of W&M people, places or marks. Every AI-assisted asset must meet the same brand and accessibility standards as any other asset, and the content must be reviewed before it goes live.

Do

1. Use AI for early drafts and exploration, understanding the version that gets published will be real photography, real footage, or brand-approved artwork.
2. Use AI for cosmetic cleanup on real photography or video: removing stray hairs, reducing shine, or taking out a blemish or a piece of trash in the background.
3. Use AI for practical edits: cropping, resizing, color correction, lighting adjustment.
4. Use AI to prototype a layout, infographic, or storyboard concept as a starting point for your own design work, not as the final asset.
5. Label an AI-generated image or video when it is published, the same way you would credit a photographer. Example: Image created with [AI tool name].
6. Make AI-generated content accessible like any other asset: write alt text that describes what's shown, caption AI-generated video, and don't bake text into a generated image since it can't be read by a screen reader. Please refer to Â鶹Æƽâ°æ's Digital Accessibility page for more information.
7. Have a person other than the one who created it review and approve any AI-assisted image, video or audio clip before it goes live, following the same review process as any other published content.

Don't

1. Don't publish an AI-generated image, video or audio clip that could mislead, misinform or misrepresent an event, a place or a person.
2. Don't generate anything photorealistic that depicts an event or scene that did not happen, and don't generate photorealistic people presented as W&M students, faculty, staff or alumni, whether real or invented. See the table below for the specific subjects that are off-limits to generate.
3. Don't create, modify or imitate the W&M wordmark, logo, seal, coat of arms or any other trademarked mark.
4. Don't depict campus buildings, structures, art or grounds that do not exist yet as if they are already built, and don't add invented features to a real building, such as an extra floor, a statue or different signage. A labeled architectural or concept rendering for a planned project is fine, as long as it's clearly marked as a rendering and not presented as something that already exists.
5. Don't publish AI slop: low-quality or generic images or video with no human oversight that adds nothing for the viewer.
6. Don't upload photos of identifiable students, unreleased campaign assets or other confidential material into a consumer AI tool. For guidance on approved AI tools and security measures, visit the GenAI Guidelines for Use page.

What Can and Cannot Be Generated

This covers finished, published work. Drafts and mockups can use AI more freely, following the Do's above.

Breakdown of what can and cannot be generated by AI

Subject	Ruling	Reasoning and Guidance
The Wren Building, historic buildings, campus landmarks	Do not generate	These are real, documented places and a generated version reads as wrong to anyone who knows campus. Canto provides real .
Students, faculty, staff, alumni	Do not generate	AI-generated images can misrepresent the W&M community. provides these images.
Campus grounds and identifiable campus scenes	Do not generate	A generated scene can invent signage, maps, or directional markers that read as real, which misinforms visitors and works against campus wayfinding. Canto provides real .
W&M logo, cypher, seal, coat of arms	Do not generate	AI almost always gets this wrong. Canto provides these .
Abstract textures, patterns, background gradients	Acceptable to generate with conditions	Use brand colors.
A griffin	Acceptable to generate with conditions	A griffin can be generated for athletics and spirit contexts such as game day social graphics, Homecoming, orientation and similar school-spirit content. It must include an eagle's head, lion's body, lion's tail and wings, and must be green and white. It's never the sole brand mark on a piece, and it isn't a substitute for the official Athletics logo, which is trademarked. Canto provides .

Common AI Mistakes To Look For

AI-generated images, video, and brand marks can look convincing at first glance and fall apart on a closer look. Some content from stock libraries, vendors or campus partners may be AI-generated without a label. Use these common flaws to review any image or video before it goes live, whether you made it or someone else did.

Common AI Mistakes In Images

• Hands and fingers: extra or missing fingers, fingers that fuse together, joints that bend the wrong way.
• Text and signage: garbled, misspelled, or nonsensical lettering on signs, books, screens, or clothing.
• Eyes and teeth: pupils that do not match between eyes, asymmetric eyes, too many or uneven teeth.
• Repeating patterns: brick, fabric, or fencing that warps, repeats unnaturally, or dissolves into noise partway across the image.
• Lighting and shadows: shadows falling in different directions than the light source, or reflections that do not match what they are reflecting.
• Object counts: extra limbs, duplicated background objects, or a crowd with the same face repeating.
• Edges: haloing or blur where a subject meets the background, especially around hair.
• Wrong buildings: AI often renders different colonial buildings instead of those on campus, most often the Governor's Palace or the Capitol building in Colonial Williamsburg, since both are colonial-era brick in the same town.
• The cupola: a frequent tell on the Wren Building. AI-generated cupolas are often the wrong shape, sit in the wrong spot on the roofline, or are borrowed from a different building's tower entirely.
• Invented text: cornerstones, historical markers, or building plaques with lettering that is garbled or does not match what is actually inscribed.

Common AI Mistakes In Video

• Flicker and morphing: textures that shimmer, or objects that subtly change shape from one frame to the next.
• Unnatural motion: movement that looks floaty or weightless, or limbs that bend in ways a body cannot.
• Lip sync: mouth movement that drifts out of sync with the audio.
• Shot-to-shot consistency: a background detail that changes between two shots meant to be the same location.
• Audio: a generated or cloned voice, a soundtrack that doesn't match the room's acoustics, or narration that drifts out of sync with what's on screen.

Common AI Mistakes In Logos and Marks

• A mark that is close to the W&M logo but slightly off: wrong typeface, a warped cypher or seal, an extra flourish, or a green or gold that does not match the approved values.
• Malformed or garbled lettering in any generated wordmark.
• Asymmetry or an incorrect element count in a seal or crest, such as the wrong number of shield sections.

If you catch yourself checking whether something is real, that is the signal to stop and go to Canto instead of trying to fix it. When in doubt, ask: am I trying to replicate something that exists on campus? If yes, it does not get published.