#12: All hail the algorithm!
This week: A guest post by Aidan Walker on AI-made misinformation memes | The Wrong Biennale | Plus your invitation to an exclusive webinar on the future of customer engagement
Twelve issues in, this week we venture into new territory: a guest post!
I started reading
author of the brilliant a few months ago - and his writing clued me into the Erosion Birds memes we covered back in Issue 9. So I was delighted when he offered to write a guest post on how AI is opening up a new vein of creative misinformation memes.I hope you enjoy.
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AI Presidents // Turning misinformation into art
Aidan Walker is a writer and editor at Know Your Meme, who covers memes at his Substack How To Do Things With Memes.
When easily-accessible technology for making deepfakes using AI first hit the scene earlier this year, political commentators warned about a spike in fake news, misinformation, and threats to democracy. But nobody expected that what TikTok would do with this technology might be even more uncanny—or, perhaps, illuminating.
The memes of allhailthealgorithm, which show female pop stars with the faces and voices of politicians, present a variety of AI-generated chimerae. We see Ice Spice’s body with Obama’s face and voice defining “munch,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as pop star and Elon Musk paramour Grimes discussing her internet-famous story of only eating spaghetti for a year.
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These aren’t the first AI memes that feel like misinformation. The earliest wave used the voice generator at Eleven Labs to create skits of politicians gaming together. ElevenLabs operates on a freemium model: you can join the Starter tier for $5 a month, upload a few minutes of a Biden speech to clone his voice, put in whatever text you desire, and then have the President talk about any subject you want.
There’s something undeniably funny about hearing Generation Z slang jump out the mouth of Joe Biden, or see political opposites like Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen explore a Minecraft server together. The world imagined by these AI memes is a bizarre alternate one where politicians are hip and friendly towards each other. Using AI tools, it manages to look and sound the same as the real-world version of politics we pick up on the television or elsewhere online.
allhailthealgorithm draws from this infant AI art tradition. They saw videos which used voice-cloning AI tools, many of which are available on the same freemium model as ElevenLabs, to make songs that were “by” particular artists, such as the famous faux-Drake song “Heart on my Sleeve” last spring, and thought they should apply that approach to other pop artists and to Presidents.
These memes might be a civic good, because they condition people to understand just how realistic AI tools can make a piece of false content look. People know intuitively that Rishi Sunak is not “sticking out his gyatt for the rizzler,” but it really does sound just like him. So when they see a more sinister deepfake, they’ll have a habit of skepticism built in.
There’s a chaotic attitude underneath it all: are people laughing as the world burns? Yes.
All the finger-wagging from mainstream media about the dangers of AI video-manipulation technology is exactly the kind of thing young TikTokers, in a punk kind of gesture, would send up by making misinformation for humorous effect. It also proves that nothing is holy: men and women in positions of power — who have traditionally been set apart from the rest of us by posh accents, elaborate phrasings, and a buttoned-up image — are no longer in control of their images. With freely accessible technology, anybody online can now take a personal brand and turn it into whatever they like.
The artistic possibilities for this essentially folk-satirical tradition are endless. But the AI tinkerers that might stick around best are the ones who go deeper than just the joke of hearing Joe Biden’s voice say he smokes hella weed, who do something more than knock politicians off pedestals. It’ll be the ones who can use the technology to show what good artists always show: a compelling and original perspective on how the world is and how it could be better.
This Tuesday! // Join me for an Exclusive Webinar!
On December 12th, I can’t wait to co-host an exclusive webinar on the future of customer engagement for museums with the brilliant Anh Nguyen, CEO of NIMI.
NIMI is a platform for digital collectibles that’s already helped the Belvedere launch their hugely successful NFT project. Both Anh and I believe one key future trend is how digital collectibles will evolve and enhance the membership and donor experience for museums and other cultural institutions and visitor attractions.
We’re going to explore this and case studies of blockchain adoption in a 45 minute live session from Chicago Booth’s London Campus this Tuesday 12th December at 4pm London time.
Project of the week // TheWrong Biennale
A quick shout to go an dive in to TheWrong Biennale, an absolute goldmine of digital creative goodness.
Running through to March, it’s an online-only festival of digital art of every creed.
What I love most about it is its Television mode, which plays highlights in an ever-shifting loop.
There is a lifetime’s goodness to discover here.
Dive in.
See you next week.
❤️🔥❤️🔥