Going Viral is an interactive artwork that invites people to intervene in the spreading of misinformation by sharing informational videos about COVID-19 that feature algorithmically generated celebrities, social media influencers, and politicians that have previously shared misinformation about coronavirus. In the videos, the influencers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they have promoted on social media.
The project can be viewed at: goingviral.art/
The videos in Going Viral are made using a Pix2Pix conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). In a cGAN, a neural network is trained on sets of two images where one image becomes a map to produce a second image. In Going Viral, the two images are landmarks from facial recognition and a frame from a video. Once the model is trained, it can be used to generate an image of a face based on only the facial landmarks from the first image.
This work is a collaboration with Jennifer Gradecki, and was made possible in part by the genrous support of NEoN Digital Art Festival.
