Carbon Copy
Summary
The rise of AI tools has not only transformed work environments, but has also reshaped how people interact in communities and social relationships. Generative AI (GenAI) tools now produce artworks that are indistinguishable to the untrained eye, generate symphonic music, and create videos that reimagine movie trailers or narrate dreams. This has blurred the line between human creators and AI curators, complicating the notion of authorship. As AI becomes integrated into human culture, permeating films, museums, and social media, it embeds itself also into our imaginations and social ecosystems. This increasing presence of AI raises concerns about authenticity, as distinguishing between human-made and AI-generated content becomes difficult. This is reflected in fake news or fake social media profiles that lead to misinformation and misidentity online.
CARBON COPY leverages cutting-edge GenAI tools to create a fake dating platform powered by ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. The work draws on insights from a study of dating app users, result of a paper published by our team in CSCW. By observing human behavior on creating profiles on dating platforms, we analyzed real users' patterns of text descriptions, and utilized GPT to craft profile text that mimic the language used by them. We then use the GenAI-created profile text to prompt the generation of images featuring a GenAI persona in different scenarios. To maintain visual contintuity and ensure a heightened sense of realism, we swapped in the faces across all images for a persona using Stable Diffusion XL Turbo, imbuing the characters with consistent identity across diverse situations. This approach allows us to craft a sequence of dating profiles ranging from highly realistic to progressively less human, leading visitors browsing through the profiles to go from initial trust in the profiles' human identity to the slow realization that these profiles are fabricated in an uncanny but familiar way. The online platform mirrors the functionality of familiar dating apps, complete with options to like, skip, and chat, enabling visitors to engage with these AI characters as if they are potential mates. As their interactions deepen, subtle signs of inconsistency start to emerge, triggering growing sense of unease, until the visitor recognizes that these profiles are entirely AI-created, leading to deeper reflection.
CARBON COPY uses an interactive dating experience to provoke visitors to engage with real-world issues of AI-driven misidentification, urging them to reflect on the trust they place in digital personas and the broader consequences of AI's infiltration into uniquely human social ecosystems. By inviting audiences to critically examine how GenAI-created content is reshaping perceptions and interactions in human social relationships, the project sparks public discourse on misinformation and misidentification in social media profiles.
Main dating website: Carbon Copy.
Select dating profiles: Instagram.
Exhibition: Athens Digital Arts Festival.
Exhibition: Beyond Human Spaces at PMQ, Hong Kong.
CSCW Paper: An Image of Ourselves in Our Minds.