INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 13 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 14) audio that purport to be someone or something they are not. And while lying with AI might seem to be even more egregious and unacceptable, it has strong First Amendment protection too, according to Littau and his research partner Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart, journalism professor at Texas Christian University. “The courts say there’s no difference,” says Littau. “You have a right to lie with AI.” In their paper “The Right to Lie with AI? First Amendment challenges for state efforts to curb false political speech using deepfakes and synthetic media,” Littau and Stewart provide a primer on AI and deepfake technology and explore the viability of laws created to limit or ban AI generated false political speech. Littau and Stewart describe two types of AI outputs driving the conversation about the technology’s use in mass media. Outputs that are “processes” occur when AI operates in the background to manage a task without specific human oversight. Search results are the primary form of AI process outputs. Outputs that are “products,” often referred to as generative AI, create something original such as images or text. Deepfakes, on the other hand, are more comparable to photoshopping. No original material is generated, but existing images are swapped Littau says he and Stewart hope their research will help inform public policy. “One of our hopes was that we would move the ball around public discourse regarding these tools,” he says. They suggest that “a better path to managing deepfakes and AI-generated false political speech—both in legal terms and in practicality—may be rooted in technology and the free market instead. It’s a fast-moving and volatile topic, and Littau says the paper creates a foundation for future AI research. There are lots of questions to explore, and he is working on them. “What does it mean to be human in a world of AI? he says. “What happens to the life we are living when we are increasingly relying on technology to manage our lives for us, when we are outsourcing our brains and our thinking.” modern languages & literatures Moscow Conceptualism Revisited If you wanted to create impactful art challenging the status quo in a repressive country, you’d think you would have to go “underground.” Indeed, that’s exactly where a new, alternative art form called Moscow Conceptualism arose in the late Soviet era—operating in secrecy, away from viewers, critics, and especially those in power. But Russian professor Mary Nicholas says that a subset of Moscow artists of the time—who she considers among the most influential—challenged the idea they should be hidden—and with great impact. For Nicholas, professor of modern languages and literatures, Exhibit A is a street procession in 1978, where a small group of conceptual artists called The Nest carried a red banner down a Moscow street. The event—called “Art to the Masses”—is pictured on the cover of Nicholas’ new book, Moscow Conceptualism, 1975-1985: Words, Deeds, Legacies. The book takes the study of Moscow Conceptualism to a place where no one has gone before. It is not just a primer on the topic, but an argument that previous analyses of the movement by art A deepfake video of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is produced during an election campaign. “Wrapped Star (Hi, Christo!)” by the Nest (Gnezdo), 1979. (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11) Himanshu Sharma / Alamy Live News, Courtesy of Mary Nicholas
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