Pietro Rustici, Jana Tothill .C, Luca Giacolini, Chris Ernst
Is truth an outdated concept? It feels like we are living in an opaque echo chamber of half-truths and the occasional blatant lie. This spectacle unfolds in an election campaign more beautiful, complex and horrific than anywhere else – a Petri dish for the discourse in our digital democracy. We can observe in great detail the rhetoric manoeuvres of each candidate and their version of the truth presented.
We created an echo chamber of our own, consisting of an AI interpreting the tweets of prominent candidates, journaling the daily discourse and finally replying to the original tweet with its own interpretation. For this we used the Italian election campaign 22nd of August and 22nd of September 2022.
Every day, the most popular tweet of every candidate is algorithmically selected, translated into English and then interpreted by Midjourney, an AI specialised in visualising text inputs. The resulting images are updated into the web gallery everyday, alongside the original tweet in Italian and the English translation. Finally, the image is posted as a comment on the candidate’s original tweet, closing a loop of input and output.