Infodemic

"Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous." -Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO

Infodemic is a neural network-generated video that questions the mediated narratives created by social media influencers and celebrities about the coronavirus. The speakers featured in the video are an amalgam of celebrities, influencers, politicians, and tech moguls that have contributed to the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus by amplifying rumors, repeating narratives that are contrary to those of official health agencies or developing technologies that amplify untrue content. The talking heads in Infodemic are generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that predicts the pixels for each frame of a video through an algorithmic process like those used by search engines and social media news feeds. Search and content recommendation algorithms that once promised to provide access to more information and enable the public to make well-informed decisions have actually made it more difficult to find accurate information on important and politically charged topics. Infodemic was an offical selection at the Flux Moving Image Festival, Film Oxford, UK.

Process

The cGAN in Infodemic was trained on a corpora of multiple individuals simultaneously. The result is a talking head that morphs between different speakers or becomes a glitchy Frankensteinian hybrid of different people that contributed to the current infodemic speaking the words of academics, medical experts, or journalists that are correcting false narratives or explaining how misinformation is created and spread. The plastic, evolving, and unstable speakers in the video evoke the mutation of the coronavirus, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge.

Citations:

• Dejan Grba, "Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art" Digital 2, no. 1: 1-32, 2022.
• Dejan Grba, "AI Art," Scholarly Community Encyclopedia, January 2022.
• “Infodemic,” Issues in Science and Technology Magazine, Coronavirus Pandemic Creative Responses Archive, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS).
• Radio Interview: “iDMAa Weird Media Conference and Exhibition: Infodemic,” Art Beat, KQAL, July 5, 2022.
• Paz Peña O., “Technologies for the Celebration of Multiple Ends,” Arts Santa Mónica.
• Israel Rodríguez Giralt, “States of emergency: art in times of pandemic,” Arts Santa Mónica.
• Jesús Arpal Moya, Nancy Garín and Antoine Silvestre, “Contraimaginaris Postpandèmics,” Arts Santa Mónica.
• Ian Alan Paul, “An enemy like the future,” Arts Santa Mónica.