Mastertalk: Computational Propaganda
Computational Propaganda describes the use of automatization, algorithms and big data analysis, on the context of political processes, with the aim to influence the public opinion.
One widely used technique is the creation of fake social media profiles. These so called bots, trolls and cyborgs are usually summarised under the umbrella-term social bots. There structures range from purely artificial to human operated and various combinations of both. Social bots take part in online discussions, defame certain opinions, spread misinformation and create a false impression of the public opinion. All in favor of, and made by, political parties and candidates. Other techniques of computational propaganda include search engine optimization, micro-targeting and micro profiling. The latter was heavily used by Cambridge Analytica during the US presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
Since 2010 computational propaganda has become a rising phenomenon and different countries start to see this development as a vital threat to democracy. During his studies at the Hochschule der Künste Bern Max Frischknecht pursues this topic and the role of the visual within. At the talk he will give an insight of his current research status.
The Leviathan: on the need of new narratives for intelligent machines (Yann Patrick Martins)
AI, after a cold winter, shines again and its powerful rays are passed from mouth to blog to newspaper articles and so on. The narratives surrounding this term have mainly two forms: dystopia or utopia. Whether the latter or the former, such narratives put machines on a position of dominance and control. But are those narratives the only one available to us? Can we create new narratives for machines that don’t involve catastrophy or eternal peace? What would happen if we shift our understanding of machines, from pure technical to more natural entities? What if we start to think machines in terms of emergence rather than creation? Could this help overcoming reductive narratives in which the role of machine is only good or bad? In this talk I will try to explain why we need new narratives that bridge technology/culture to nature, grouping them as planetary ecosystem, in which life whether technical or organic is the result of emergence.