Political Deepfakes: Cultural Discourses of Synthetic Audio-Visual Manipulations (2021)
Curator: Laura Carvajal Rodriguez | Temple University | 2021
Acquisition Editor: Andrew Iliadis
Collection Editor: Isabel Pedersen
Collection Archivist: Sharon Caldwell
The Political Deepfakes collection features artifacts that reveal threats to democracy and other problems, including disinformation, fake news, and unethical practices. This dataset portrays the cultural discourses about political deepfakes and how distributed digital media, broadly constructed on the internet, are discussing this new technology. This growing collection includes talks given by experts, news articles, journal articles, podcasts, and law documentation.
Deepfakes are videos of individuals produced using AI techniques, such as deep learning, to create synthetic media that misleads viewers. There are many other ways to edit audiovisual content such as face swapping, rotoscope, speeding and slowing, face altering, lookalikes, and recontextualizing and sophisticated AI technologies, (Paris & Donovan, 2019).
Deepfakes challenges notions of authenticity, credibility, verifiability, and misinformation. Society is only beginning to navigate the political and cultural consequences that deepfakes bring.