The Columbia Digital Storytelling lab brings the fourth iteration of Story I/O, this time, it’s AI-themed.

Story I/O – Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots is the fourth installment of Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab’s annual prototyping event. Every year, this symposium helps widen the horizons of storytelling, testing new genres, forms, and functions. Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots focuses on technology, and how it influences an audience’s trust and sense of reality, in addition to how we create digital community space. “The underlying technology behind deepfakes is rapidly accelerating, which has only exacerbated frittering trust in our institutions and increased polarization,” the event page writes. Organized by Lance Weiler, the director of DSL, this event was the first Story I/O to be held digitally, bringing in an audience from Brazil to India to Queens.

Participants enter the Zoom. 5…10…40…finally 74 people, populate the room. Cameras are off, until a message illuminates the screen: a link, to an interactive collaboration platform called Miro. The backbone of the experience, Miro, is where participants will soon solve a mystery and brainstorm ideas, collaborating digitally, in real-time. The five-hour experience begins.

Participants are sorted into two groups: humans and bots. The humans are placed in break-out rooms with other humans, and let loose on a dynamic Miro board, that contains unrelated and eerie bits of information that periodically disappear and reappear on-screen: haphazard collages of unanswered text message screenshots, sliced sections of a Rorschach test, and bills for a rented body camera create a mystery for the humans to solve. 

While the humans explore their cryptic Miro board, the bots are brought together and met with the backstage of the operation. A manager chorales the bots and explains to them their task: they are invited to participate as not only an audience but an actor, helping to stage the show. Bots are given a simple set of instructions: change your name to MR, turn off your video, and infiltrate a human breakout room.

Eventually, this cryptic demonstration ends and the organizers bring all members of the audience right back to where they started—in a single, big Zoom call. Lance Weiler deconstructs the experience: arguing that the workings of our minds in those one and a half hours, mirrored general human psychology in corroborating conspiracy theories and in finding comfort in simplistic explanations to make sense of a world that doesn’t have any. He uses that notion to segue into a dialogue about creating safer and more comforting social spaces in the digital world. This constitutes the premise of the second half of the event, where the same participants are put into break-out rooms, but this time with a more constructive goal: to design a social space within which they could feel comforted and safe.

Unlike the first half, the second half of the event offers stability and some sense of community, as participants get to know each other. Four sessions lead participants through a brainstorming session, the goal of which is to create a community digital space. Teams collaborate on a thematically organized Miro board—and use the space to jot down their thoughts and ideas, and eventually scaffold these ideas into a structural diagram that defines their model. 

One goal of the Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots appeared to be to illustrate how susceptible people are to fabricating and believing conspiracy theories. While the event managed to compel its participants to conspire (and therefore fulfill their own hypotheses), very little was done to explore the psychological mechanisms at play—the organizers seemed to believe that they had succeeded simply by placing audience members in successful simulations without actually evaluating their rationale for the same in great detail. 

Additionally, the themes of truth/falsehood, reality/simulation were constantly alluded to, but not fully explored. Presented with AI-generated images and a mystery, participants were nudged towards exploring what is real and what is fake. Although some discussion of those themes arose interpersonally, the Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots lacked synthesis—an organizer pointing out the things we should have picked up on. Without guidance, those themes remained simply allusions.

Whether intentionally or not, a large takeaway of the event was an instilled fear of AI and robots. The menacing nature of the challenge, the lurking bots, and the lack of clarity through the process led participants to further distrust AI technology. Again, this was never explicitly stated, and organizers never openly endorsed or condemned AI, but the format of Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots certainly cast it in a negative light. If the intent was to frighten, it was successful.

A creature of the Digital Storytelling Lab, the purpose of this event was to expand the horizons of storytellers. In that sense, it was incredibly successful. The event catered to writers, filmmakers, and other storytellers looking to expand their horizons. This Story I/O gave a good launching point for storytellers, and it was a successful experiment in democratized storytelling. Miro is certainly a new and unconventional medium to tell a story, and  Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots used the platform to the best of their abilities. As for the second half of the event, where participants attempted to translate physical social spaces into digital ones, it was largely successful. By guiding participants through the activity a little more closely, there was able to be a more productive discussion. However, time constraints made it particularly challenging to come up with any actual tangible solutions. But although nobody walked out of the Zoom with a fully-functioning social media app, it did succeed in making participants think about digital space as communal space.  Another recurring theme throughout Trust in an Age of Deepfakes & Bots was the idea of teamwork and cooperation, and fostering community through problem-solving. By enabling people across countries, age groups, and professions to come together to critically think about building communities virtually, the event’s set-up managed to create some unique sense of community on its own, thereby fulfilling a part of its own promise.

The wild world wide web via Pixabay