Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
Monday Night Lecture Series | Spring 2020

Artifice Intelligence: Digital Policing in the Age of Deep Fakes

Mitali Thakor • Wesleyan University

February 10 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

“Deep fakes” are synthetic media generated by artificial intelligence. Recent deep fakes have included nonconsensual pornographic videos and altered political propaganda, prompting a multimillion-dollar investigative response from defense agencies and technology companies to develop tools to forensically detect these new forms of fakery. Yet computer science has always been a discipline fixated on the twinned processes of successful imitation and the detection of such imitation. How do deep fakes symbolize a revolution in digital fraud, and how do they reinvigorate longstanding anxieties over mimesis and simulation? Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, critical race studies of surveillance, and the anthropology of computing, this talk describes ethnographic research into the policing of deep fakes, studying the network of law enforcement, content moderators, and algorithms enrolled into detecting and removing suspected fakes. Such digital policing relies on the infrastructure laid by efforts to use facial recognition and the labor of human moderators to detect and remove child pornography, murders, and other violent videos from online platforms. What forms of violence are recapitulated in the production and circulation of the deep fake? And what forms of labor, human and digital, are harnessed to hone the skill of “artifice” intelligence, to successfully intuit and inspect the authenticity of media?

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. and are held in the Daniel Family Commons (located in the Usdan University Center) unless otherwise noted.

Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
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