Abstract Dominated and pushed by the AI industry, the grand narrative and practices of GenAI has become a hegemony that sees the world—whether it's physical or conceptual—extractable, computable, modellable and profitable. Consequentially, our daily visual world has been flooded with synthetic media that not only spread particular ideologies in politics, but alter the ways we perceive and "see" the world in reality. Now, the visual representation of a fact, a word, a truth or an affair can be algorithmically defined and outputted by GenAI models. When what we are seeing are no longer believing, conceptual worlds—shaped by our visual world—are endangered. How can artistic research—through the field of design—critically respond to the synthetic realities mediated via visual means?

The presentation centres on my artistic research project Border of Democracy - Human, interface, surveillance capitalism and its outcome—Seeds of Truth—a real-time interactive installation utilising Stable Diffusion to make visible the relationship between visual representation of word(s) and GenAI in politics. In the realm of image GenAI, a "seed" refer to a series of numbers that instructs AI on how to generate an image. Each seed ensures the generated output is reproducible. Through my research, I realised that seeds create "versions" of the relationship between a word and associated visual elements, which visually defines what the "word's world" is about.

In the presentation, I will unpack the research process and reflection by showing experiments on deepfake technology, how the visual representations of word(s) as prompts are relentlessly "defined" by GenAI, and the artistic outcome Seeds of Truth. By sharing how I problematised GenAI by repurposing GenAI, the presentation serves as an urgent meeting point for collectively discussing and reflecting on how design and artistic research can respond to the synthetic and post-synthetic realities the world is facing.