Seeds of Truth
Solo exhibition by Associate Professor Albert Cheng-Syun Tang at the Department of Design
Seeds of Truth is an interactive installation and exhibition by Associate Professor Albert Cheng-Syun Tang using generative AI to explore the fluidity of “truth.” It critically examines how AI shapes political narratives, raising questions about trust and representation in the digital age.
In the past two years, almost nothing can capture the world's attention and imagination more than the widespread and explosive rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Since the launch of ChatGPT and AI image generators such as DALL·E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, our digital world have been flooded with AI generated contents that spread particular ideologies and lead to certain actions in a mass scale. As witnessed in the local and national elections across the globe in 2024, generative AI is utlised to shape a political landscape where "truth" can be defined, controlled and even "versionised." It seems that what we are seeing we are no longer believing. This has, already, a disruptive influence on politics and global democracies.
Composed of a custom designed real-time processing system and the open-source AI image generator Stable Diffusion, Seeds of Truth is an interactive installation that makes visible the relationship between visual representation of truth and generative AI.
Seeds of Truth invites the audience to interact and experience not only the realness and lifelikeness, but also the artificiality, absurdities and fluidity of "truth" generated by AI. By utilising generative AI from a critical viewpoint, this work aims to raise awareness and questions about how politics are consumed visually and the political nature of AI, and the consequences coming along. What are we seeing? How can we trust what we see? Does what we see tell, represent or define truth?
The exhibited work Seeds of Truth is the outcome of a pilot artistic research project Border of Democracy - Human, interface, surveillance capitalism supported by strategic fund (2023-2024) from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.