is a case study that outlines the key insights and outcomes from a project undertaken with BBC R&D, London and Imperial College, London aimed at addressing the wicked problem of Synthetic Politics and Misinformation in
the Age of Generative AI, by employing systems thinking, lean startup and entrepreneurial innovation methodologies
PARTNERS : BBC R&D + Imperial College London + Wicked Acceleration Labs
KEYWORDS : Synthetic Politics, Wicked Problems, System Dynamics, Entrepreneurial Innovation
TEAM : Wenxuan Ji, Zhenzhen Zhao, Shuhei Okubo, Tanvi Jain
YEAR : 2024
2024 marks the biggest year of elections in world history with
more than half of the world’s population living in a country holding a nationwide vote. The information ecosystem is being polluted due to harmful misinformation and disinformation with technologies like Gen AI making it easier to create high-quality fake content. With over 4 billion people heading to the polls this year, misinformation has emerged as the biggest threat to electoral integrity
As we tread into the darkest ages of the digital information revolution, the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2018) highlights the power and wealth-driven ambitions of capitalists with the agenda to create and control behavioural future markets. Political belief and behaviour modification through the spread of misinformation and disinformation is possibly one of, if not the most ‘wicked’ use cases and extreme outcomes of surveillance capitalism, orchestrated by capitalists, systemic stakeholders and bad actors. Given the technology-fuelled, unprecedented rise in misinformation generation, the proliferation of synthetic and misleading media in the context of Politics poses a severe threat at various macro, meso and micro levels – threatening international relations, democracies, sovereignty as well as societal and individual identities.
Historically, the most common form of misinformation was context manipulation and not content manipulation wherein the claims about the media were modified, instead of the content itself. However, with easy access to emerging technologies and AI tools, and the ability to generate manipulated content – through image, video, audio-based deep fakes, shallow fakes and hyper-targeting techniques, the misinformation landscape is undergoing an unrecognisable transformation. The black-box problem of misinformation when coupled with the black-box problem of artificial intelligence has the potential to exponentially drive up the degree of wickedness (complexity, dynamism, interconnectivity, conflicting interests) of this problem.