Deepfakes are warping reality. This AI project turns them into a history lesson

At SXSW, filmmaker Gabo Arora’s immersive installation uses generative AI to place participants inside famous speeches, blending their voice and likeness into archival footage.

AI-generated content is making it harder to trust what we see and hear. But at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a new installation is using the same tech to place people inside history’s most defining moments.

“The Great Dictator,” which premiered this week in Austin, flips the script on what deepfakes have come to represent. Instead of using generative AI to create misinformation, it uses AI video and voice tools to blend participants into archival footage to experience history through their own voice and likeness. 

It’s the latest project from filmmaker and artist Gabo Arora, who wanted to show how emerging tech can be used for something other than profit, warfare, or propaganda.

“This is an exhibit that examines something that was as powerful 3,000 years ago with no technology, with the ancient Greeks,” Arora says. “It really shows you we might have all the technology we want, and humans don’t change. We have something hardwired in us about rhetoric and power and someone speaking up.”

At a hotel in downtown Austin, attendees step up to a podium flanked by three large screens cycling archival footage. After consenting for their voice and likeness to be used, the person then chooses one of three speeches from three very different eras: Malcolm X’s 1964 “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in Cleveland, Ronald Reagan’s 1987 “Tear down this wall” speech in Germany, and Zohran Mamdani’s 2024 victory speech in New York City.

Participants then recite a 90-second excerpt from a teleprompter while an AI-generated crowd reacts with cheers at some moments and falls silent at others, based on the speaker’s words and tone. Minutes later, they are shown a short film in which their cloned voice continues the speech while their likeness is seamlessly inserted into the original footage. The project relies on several generative AI platforms, including ElevenLabs to capture a participant’s vocal signature and Runway for video generation.

Part art project, part film, and part immersive experience, the project takes its title from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator, a bold satire that used performance and cinema to confront Hitler and fascism at the height of Nazi power. 

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