DeFake @ RIT Interactive Media Symposium

The exhibit

What Do You Mean by “Fake”? An Interactive Exploration of Synthetic Media — with Kelly Wu, Ishmam Bin Rofi and Palavi Vinod Bhole.

Visitors defined terms via microphone or keyboard (live transcription into a shared definition pool), played Is This Real? on authentic vs. AI-generated images and videos with a leaderboard, then saw which “media persona” their definition resembled — highlighting how divergent everyday interpretations of “fake” and related labels really are.

Why it matters

If labels like “deepfake” and “AI-generated” mean different things to different people, detection tools and policies have to account for that ambiguity — not assume a single shared mental model.