The Bipartisan President
To explore how America could once be reunited, artist Most used AI to create new political slogans, that couldn’t be seen as liberal or conservative (by other AI). He then fused the texts with an endless Biden-Trump AI-morph. Meet the bipartisan president…
The slogans were created with text generation AI (GPT3). The artist then used other algorithms to accept or reject the output. Like an algorithm specialized in classifying text as either liberal or conservative. Which only accepted ‘bipartisan’ messages that couldn’t be classified as outspoken liberal or conservative. This sharply increased the quality of GPT3’s output.*
Interestingly, the bipartisan slogans (shown in the movie) had quite distinct characteristics. Different from more conservative or liberal slogans in the project (not shown).
For example: Bipartisan slogans evade concrete policy themes. So in general do not mention ‘climate crisis’, ‘strengthening the military’, etc. They stay at a broader, more inspiring level. Filled with hollow rhetoric though… Also, bipartisan messages combine ‘conservative’ terms like fight and win, with ‘liberal’ words as together.
The visuals of the morphing faces in the movie are also AI generated. An AI model was built that understands the characteristics of Trump’s and Biden’s face. From this understanding the AI can generate infinite variations and transitions between the faces.
Next steps could be to actually try to let AI write new bipartisan policy. Or build a real time hollow rhetoric identifier.
* Note for nerds: this setup resembles a GAN system.