Photo BOO-th: Designing Visceral Encounters with Synthetic Intimate Imagery

How would you feel if you saw an image of yourself doing something you didn’t do? How would you feel knowing said image was created without your consent? For many people, especially women, these questions are not just hypothetical. Technological advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Generative AI, have made it extremely easy and cheap to generate and distribute (non-consensual) synthetic images and videos that depict real people’s voices, faces, or bodies (i.e., deepfakes). Non-consensual synthetic imagery often depicts intimate and sexually explicit scenarios and is considered a form of sexual abuse. We demonstrate Photo BOO-th, an interactive installation designed to turn the creation of non-consensual intimate imagery into a visceral, creepy experience. Through this experience, we invite attendees to grapple with the questions above, discuss the societal harms associated with creating and distributing non-consensual synthetic imagery, and critique how consent is understood and enacted between people and technology.