‘Alienat[ing] Me from Me' through Machine Learning: Gillian Wearing and deepfakery

My talk proposes that the study of theatre, a form and practice steeped in artifice, can help us grapple with and find nuance in anxieties around generative AI’s fakeness. Using the work of conceptual artist Gillian Wearing as an illuminating site, I propose that when generative AI creates persuasive synthetic representations, or presents the illusion of human likeness or labor, it acts theatrically—and usefully. The talk argues for fakeness as itself a valuable methodology, and for the importance of distinguishing between a well-rehearsed, deeply familiar antipathy toward the fake and artificial and the demonstrated harms and substantive threats that attend artificial intelligence’s development and deployment.