ILLC mid-summer Colloquium

1. Trusting AI-
generated
content: a
techno-scientific
approach
Federica Russo
Philosophy & ILLC, UvA | SOLARIS – Project Coordinator
@federicarusso | @solaris_eu

2. New wine and
new bottles?
• Good news spread fast, but deepfakes spread even faster
• The power of generative AI
• (re)produce video, audio, and textual contents
• Lots of questions on the table:
• Threatening democratic processes?
• Strengthening democratic engagement?
• Change education objectives and assessment?
• Challenge authorship regulation in art and academia
• …
2

3. Understanding
deepfakes
• Why users ‘trust’ deepfakes, from a system
perspective
• How do deepfakes ‘travel’ on social media?
• What is the appropriate level of intervention to
diminish the effects of infodemics?
• What is the good use of deepfakes?
3

4. Methodology and approach
4

5. A system
perspective
on
deepfakes

6. Deepfakes are not all alike …

7. The
network

8. What makes this
approach ‘techno-
scientific’?

9. Poiêsis:
the
partnership
between
humans and
artefacts
• Philosophy of techno-science: a space to
reflect on how humans and artefacts act
together, and in given environments
• In techno-scientific contexts proper:
• How the production of knowledge is not exclusive
prerogative of human epistemic agents.
• We produce knowledge together with instruments
(analogue and digital)
• In the study of deepfakes:
• How trust in AI-generated content depends not on
the quality of the deepfake only or on characteristics
of users only but on a network of relations between
different actants

10. Why does it matter?

11. From philosophy to policy
• Deepfakes are not just a technological
problem
• This is a pernicious reduction that will make
policy narrowly focus on the technicalities of
deepfakes production and spreading
• A system-level perspective may indicate
different leverage points for different types
of policies, or regulation, or campaigns, or
other types of action

12. Trusting AI-
generated
content: a
techno-scientific
approach
Federica Russo
Philosophy & ILLC, UvA | SOLARIS – Project Coordinator
@federicarusso | @solaris_eu
Thanks to Powerpoint Designer for some design ideas 
And to my SOLARIS colleagues for taking poiêsis from theory to practice