The Book of Veles explores disinformation and credibility in computer generated images. Originally published in spring 2021 as a photobook about the Macedonian town Veles, where local youth ran hundreds of websites that pretended to be American news portals, earning quick cash and helping Trump get elected. This story also weaves in a sneaky pagan bear-god called Veles and the 1919 discovery of a forged ‘ancient’ manuscript. After the project circulated for months, a mysterious social media persona named Chloe Miskin revealed that the project itself was a forgery: all the subjects are 3D renderings and the text was written by the AI machine learning system GPT-2. This NFT collection features all the project’s intriguing strands: The “journalistic” images, the “historical” documents, the AI text – as well as a unique model gallery where the 3D avatars and objects can be traced back to the original images.
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