Synthetic Media and the Crisis of Truth
An interactive teach-in on how AI is changing our relationship to knowledge and our sense of what is real, with time for conversation and community building.
Join APEX Advocacy and adjunct professor Christopher Sebastian for a virtual workshop exploring how synthetic media is affecting our attention, memory, and experience of time.
Movements build political consciousness by carrying the lessons of struggle forward. Generative AI can give us an answer without requiring us to encounter the knowledge behind it, which deserves serious examination for movements that have had to fight against the erasure and distortion of our histories.
Drawing on three pieces of Pulitzer Center reporting on deepfakes, disinformation, and AI's effects on mental health, we'll consider the increasingly blurred boundaries between human experience and machine-generated content, and how these technologies can alter our perception of reality.
The session concludes by turning toward resistance and the possibilities for reclaiming our attention from technologies designed to capture and monetize it, redirecting that attention toward collective life and liberation.
AI’s expansion requires enormous amounts of water, energy and physical infrastructure, and Black and brown communities are already fighting the environmental harms that come with it. Billionaires and some of the world’s most powerful corporations are driving that expansion. We have much more to examine about AI than one afternoon can hold, and this workshop goes deep on one part of it.
We’ll close by turning toward resistance and the possibilities for reclaiming our attention from technologies designed to capture and monetize it, redirecting that attention toward collective life and liberation.
A few things before we gather:
This workshop engages with material that may feel difficult or activating, including discussions of suicide and mental health crises, AI-generated sexual harm and political disinformation. We’ll do our best to approach this material with care, and you are supported in choosing your level of engagement.
We’ve included a link to the PDFs below; if you have time before we gather, we’d love for you to read the articles ahead of the workshop. Having some familiarity with them will help us dive more deeply into the conversations during the breakout sessions.
Accessibility and participation: live captions? Recorded?
For accessibility accommodations or questions about participating, please contact yasmin@apexadvocacy.org
The session will include time for selected participant questions. Given the anticipated number of attendees, not all questions can be addressed.
Register in advance to attend. The Zoom link will be included in your registration confirmation email.
Registration is free; contributions are encouraged. Gift of any amount supports us at APEX Advocacy, a Black-led nonprofit committed to collective liberation.