Panel on AI and Disinformation:

Seeing is Misbelieving: Decoding AI Visual Deception

Event Overview

Within our contemporary and vast media landscape, audio-visual content holds a very important place, with photos, images and videos being particularly prevalent, and engaging.

With technological advancements, particularly the rise of generative AI, the line between real and virtual is getting increasingly murkier. The surge of hyper-realistic AI-generated content like deepfakes increasingly reshapes our social, cultural, and political landscapes, while challenging our ability to discern truth from fabrication.

This event serves as a “big reveal” to a report developed over the last year by the the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM), in collaboration with the uOttawa Information Integrity Lab. The report entitled: Visual and Multimodal Disinformation: Analysis, Challenges, Solutions, examines the current state of audio-visual disinformation media, with the aim of investigating the risks posed by deepfakes and other synthetic media, and to identify strategies and countermeasures to deal with this phenomenon.

The panel “Seeing is Misbelieving: Decoding AI Visual Deception will address recent developments in AI generated media and explore various strategies in dealing with them, including: technological advancements in detection and attribution; synthetic media’s economic and political impact; policy frameworks to regulate the creation and dissemination of synthetic content; generative AI and the ethical, legal and normative implications and, content moderation of platforms and free speech.

Moderator: Jennifer Irish

Ms. Irish was appointed as the Director of the Information Integrity Lab of the University of Ottawa in September 2023. The mission of the Lab is to advance understanding, research and analysis and mitigation measures related to of disinformation and misinformation. She serves concurrently an Associate at University of Ottawa’s Telfer Centre for Executive Leadership, as Program Director of its Executive Security and Intelligence Leadership Certificate. She brings to these positions more than three decades of senior level government experience in foreign affairs, humanitarian and refugee issues, and national and international security -- including in intelligence trends and threat assessment.

Schedule

* Schedule may be subject to change.

Our Panel

Houman Zolfaghari

Scientific Director at Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM), has over twenty years of experience in artificial intelligence in the industry, where he worked as a developer, researcher, and director. After his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Montreal in logic and category theory, he dedicated his career to various aspects of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge acquisition and modeling, always from the combined perspectives of research and its application to concrete problems.

Lena-Maria Böswald

Policy & Advocacy Manager at Das NETTZ, a Berlin-based networking initiative against online hate in Germany. Previously, she has worked as a researcher at Democracy Reporting International, analysing the spread of hate speech and AI-generated disinformation in the digital sphere, with a particular focus on elections and democratic processes. Her recent research includes publications on text-to-image generation, AI detection tools, the EU's Digital Services Act and election monitoring. Lena holds a Master's in Political Communication from the University of Amsterdam.

Co-Authors of report: What a Pixel Can Tell: Text-to-Image Generation and its Disinformation Potential (2022)

Céline Castets-Renard

Céline Castets-Renard, Faculty of Law, Civil Law, uOttawa and Research Chairholder Accountable AI in a Global Context.

Research Chairholder Accountable AI in a Global Context. She also holds a research chair in Law, Accountability and Social Trust in AI at ANITI (Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute) in France.

She is a member expert at the European Commission, Observatory Online Platform Economy.

She is a former junior member at the "Institut Universitaire de France" and Fellow at the Internet Society Project, Law Faculty, Yale University.

Her research generally focuses on the law and regulation of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in a comparative perspective (Canadian, European and American law), especially the protection of personal data and privacy, policing technologies, online platforms and cybersecurity.

She also studies the impact of technologies on human rights, equity and social justice in a global perspective, particularly in North-South relationships.