Deepfake Culture: Apprehending Synthetic Video’s Creative Potential and Hostile Misuses (28 November 2023, RMIT University Melbourne)
Deepfakes rely on machine learning and deep generative AI to produce synthetic image and video that convincingly replaces a person’s likeness with that of another person. They are hyper-realistic, leave little obvious trace of manipulation, and are designed so a human viewer cannot easily distinguish them from ‘authentic’ footage. They are typically increasingly for professional production, everyday entertainment and maliciously to spread disinformation or defame a public figure. Deepfakes are produced by easy-to-use software and smartphone apps using sophisticated algorithms to put your face or voice in a setting where you were never recorded, saying things you didn’t say. This new technology is thus a significant ‘game changer’ for creative industries, but also substantially shifts long-recognised cultural practices in which video is seen as ‘authentic’ evidence and representation. Unsurprisingly, deepfakes have unleashed enormous potential for negative uses, including disinformation, image-based abuse, trolling and hostility—fitting neatly into an extant adversarial digital culture.
This Q&A-style panel—part of the DERC Digital Hostility and Disinformation Lab series—explores some of the issues of deepfake technology from the perspective of cultural change, the legal, social and security issues that emerge, the positive and negative impacts on creative practice, and the challenges facing the financial sector and identity authentication.
Panellists include: Nicola Henry (RMIT University), Kendra Vant (Director, Europa Labs), Holly Gray (Monash University) and Rob Cover (Digital Ethnography Research Centre).
Digital hostility, policy, and social change roundtable (7 February 2024, RMIT University Melbourne)
How do we prevent online abuse and digital hostility? Is it a matter of better platform regulation, government policy or better education for users? Where does responsibility for the impact of online abuse on everyday users lie, particularly when experiencing abuse is having a known impact on user health and wellbeing?
This panel is part of an ARC Discovery project which aims to provide a comprehensive account of Australians’ experiences of online hostility, abuse, trolling and extremist hate speech, which have increased substantially over the past decade. Analysing the policy and regulatory environment, the experiences of diverse Australian users and digital workers, we argue that national and international policy development, enhanced platform regulation and supports for users are urgent remedies. The project is developing an account of how practices, attitudes and everyday innovations can contribute to regulation and education policy and social change.
This Q&A-style panel—part of the DERC Digital Hostility and Disinformation Lab series—explores some of the issues of online abuse from the perspective of cultural change, the legal, social and policy issues that emerge, the challenges facing policy-makers and practitioners, and where the intersection between policy and social change might best be found.
Panellists include: Professor Catharine Lumby (The University of Sydney), Dr Jennifer Beckett (The University of Melbourne), Dr Jay Daniel Thompson (RMIT University), Associate Professor Benedetta Brevini (The University of Sydney), Rhyle Simcock (QUT Digital Media Research Centre) and Professor Rob Cover (RMIT University).
RMIT Digital Hostility and Disinformation Lab (@ The Digital Ethnography Research Centre) 