A Talk on AI and Information Warfare for the EDI Global Forum

At the invitation of the EDI Global Forum at Fondazione Morra Greco, Nadia Naffi gave a talk titled “AI and Information Warfare: How everyday cultural forms became a battleground for narrative, memory, and public meaning.”

In her talk, she explored how contemporary information warfare no longer moves only through spectacular fakes or obvious deepfakes. It also travels through familiar cultural formats: toys, animation, memes, songs, satire, video-game aesthetics, and AI-generated imagery.

Starting from AI-generated LEGO-style videos depicting real geopolitical conflict, she examined how these formats make war instantly legible, emotionally charged, memorable, and shareable. Naffi discussed the shift from facts to frames, the role of affect in platform circulation, the rise of synthetic warfare and slopaganda, and the danger of harmful deepfakes, fabricated evidence, and synthetic impersonation.

She also introduced the idea of counter-visibility: the possibility that some formats can make ignored realities of the ground visible, while still requiring careful interpretation.

The talk ends with a call to cultural institutions. Museums, libraries, archives, and schools are not peripheral to this issue. They are essential spaces where publics can learn to read images, sources, memory, frames, and power in an age of synthetic media.

Watch the recording below.