


Infodemic (2020, Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki) 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 either repeating false narratives, or developing technologies that amplify untrue content. The talking heads are generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), which is used in some deepfake technologies. Unlike deepfake videos where a neural network is trained on images of a single person to produce a convincing likeness of that person saying things they did not say, we trained our algorithms 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, health professionals, or news anchors that are correcting false narratives or explaining the role of predictive content recommendation algorithms in the spread of online misinformation. The plastic, evolving, and unstable speakers in the video evoke the mutation of the coronavirus, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge.
Weblinks