2020
Infodemic
Fake News Travels Faster Than the Virus
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 term "infodemic" dates back to the 2003 SARS outbreak, but gained wide use in February 2020, when the WHO's director-general warned that misinformation was spreading as dangerously as the virus itself. Unlike deepfake videos, which train a model on a single person to produce a convincing likeness of them saying something they never said, Infodemic's model was trained on a corpus of many contributors to the infodemic at once — producing talking heads that morph between speakers, glitching into unstable hybrids voicing the words of the experts correcting them. The plastic, evolving speakers evoke the mutation of the virus itself, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge.
- Collaborators Jennifer Gradecki
- Awards Offical Selection: Flux Moving Image Festival, Film Oxford, UK
Process
Infodemic uses an experimental Pix2Pix conditional generative adversarial network that was trained on pairs of images where one becomes a map to produce the other. Unlike today’s diffusion models, which generate images by gradually denoising random noise over dozens of steps, Pix2Pix is a conditional GAN that produces an image in a single pass, trained by pitting a generator against a discriminator instead. Here the map is from video frames to facial landmarks. Because our training corpus contained multiple speakers, the generated frames flicker between different speakers or are a hybrid of several speakers simultaneously.
Exhibitions
- DEEP FAKE, SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2020.
- FLUX Moving Image Festival, Film Oxford, UK (virtual), August 2020.
- AREA CODE Art Fair, Digital Art Drive-In, Salem State University, MA, August 2020.
- International Conference on Computational Creativity Exhibition, Mexico City (virtual), September 2020.
- Ethical Considerations, Computer Vision Art Gallery, CVPR 2021 (virtual).
- Weird Media, IDMAA, Laird-Norton Gallery, Winona, MN
- Irruption, ISEA 2022 (Possibles), Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona, Spain June 10 – August 21, 2022.