Deepfake-Chancellor announces ban of Nazi-party
The Center for Political Beauty did it again.
The german art collective Zentrum für politische Schönheit — Center for Political Beauty in english — has published a website on which a fake Chancellor Olaf Scholz calls for a ban on the right-wing extremist party AFD.
Here’s the video:
The forgery is accompanied by presumably AI-generated voices of rightwing extremist politicians Bernd Höcke, Alice Weidel, and Alexander Gauland, reading out definitions of “exclusion”, “hostility to democracy”, or the Holocaust, and it also features around 2500 real pieces of evidence documenting unconstitutional and extremist statements by AFD politicians in their own words.
I'm not 100% sure if the video in which Olaf Scholz announces the (unfortunately) fictional ban is an actual deepfake or "just" clever video editing. Some of the lip movements seem asynchronous to the spoken content, but this could also be a result of not yet perfected AI technology. The fake voice recordings too could have been created through skillful sound editing, but the spoken sentences appear too coherent in emphasis and flow of language for that.
This fake announcement of a AFD-ban, which has been widely discussed in the german public for years now and which i support, is accompanying an art installation in form of a “prison” for AFD politicians in front of the Federal Chancellery, which is itself an “art exihibition“ of photoshopped and/or AI-generated images of AFD politicians in jail. You can see those images sans prison bars on the website too, and some look pretty synthetic to me.
From the ZPS press release:
Selected members of the AfD were taken into custody this morning in the Bundestag and brought to the provisional prison "Robert Lehr" in front of the Federal Chancellery. The 16 x 5 m high security building was erected on the forecourt of the Federal Chancellery in Berlin. The public is cordially invited to see the dangers to democracy for themselves on the spot.
This piece, like so many of ZPS's actions, is bound to spur debate and I'm curious to see which of the fake politicians will be outraged when and in what context: Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ party, the german SPD, is calling for a labeling requirement for AI-generated media, while the AFD, as the first political party, used synthetic images for its right-wing propaganda.
It should be very interesting when Nazis in the Bundestag want to debate an outrageous art piece that articulates a fake ban announcement featuring deep/shallowfakes and a fake prison for Nazi-politicians — that’s garnished with real right-wing extremist quotes by themselves which dehumanize, discriminate, glorify Nazis, deny the Shoa or call for violence. Fun times full of rightwing mental acrobatics ahead.
This piece of new media performance art raises questions about Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, which posits that tolerance must be intolerant of intolerance to ensure a tolerant society. The prison construction serves as a symbol for exactly this intolerance, while the characteristic of the forgery as an illegitimate and easily producible tool in the era of Artificial Intelligence and digital editing logic gives it an uncomfortable and unsettling nuance: How easily can propaganda be mixed up with real facts and be used or misused for political and/or totalitarian purposes?
There are no easy answers here, nowhere, and i like daring art that goes there anyways. The ZPS never was known for their subtlety and here too they use the art-technique of fakery like a hammer. This piece reveals many hidden layers and double meanings that raise a lot of questions about fakery, tolerance and politics and leaves them unanswered. Like all good art, there’s a lot to dwell on here.
While it may not quite be as good as my personal favorite of their work, Höcke's Holocaust Memorial — in which they rebuilt the famous Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the direct neighborhood of Nazi-leader and AFD-member Bernd Höcke — I find the interplay of political realities and monumental provocation here very successful as well, this time with an added layer of AI-fakery for this age of the unreal.
Well done.