Unstable Evidence
Francesca Panetta, Halsey Burgund & Halsey Burgund / Magnus Bjerg Mortensen, Shehani Fernando & Magnus Bjerg Mortensen / Denmark, United Kingdom & United States
You’ve gone viral in a social media video; but it’s not “you”, rather a digital version that looks and sounds just like you making statements you least believe in. As AI and deepfake technologies develop at a startling pace, evidence is becoming destabilised. We must prepare ourselves.
Unstable Evidence explores a world of AI-produced mis- and disinformation that is just around the corner. Using perhaps the strongest material possible – the audience members themselves and the subject matter they most abhor – it provides a viscerally shocking wake up call on the personal and societal consequences of AI-driven synthetic media creation.
The work uses AI-enhanced techniques – voice cloning and synthetic lip-syncing – to present audiences with a series of social-media style videos where they see themselves making controversial statements that they strongly disagree with – from anti-vax propaganda to cancel culture, white nationalism to gay marriage and gun rights, audience members quickly and viserally become aware of the ease of manipulating the online persona of everyday people.
By seeing and hearing themselves make statements antithetical to their true beliefs and positions, participants feel the dangers of having their online personas hijacked and forced to say something they never would have on their own. Audiences will become more aware of synthetic media and its potential uses for individual harm as well as technical methods such as watermarking that can help protect the public from nefarious uses of the technology.