AM I AI? Presenting Speculative Design at MediaWise YOUth in Vienna
In April, I had the chance to participate in MediaWise YOUth, an Erasmus+ youth exchange hosted by IKIGAI in Vienna, bringing together 25 participants from Austria, Georgia, Hungary, and Türkiye. The focus: media literacy, disinformation, and what it means to navigate a digital landscape where truth is increasingly hard to pin down.
Over the course of a week, we dug into some of the most pressing questions facing young people online today. We learned how to identify and verify fake news using practical tools, reverse image search, metadata analysis, and source cross-referencing. We explored Austria's media landscape, understanding how public broadcasting, tabloid culture, and media ownership shape what people see and believe. And through roleplay scenarios, we stepped into the messy reality of how disinformation spreads, not in the abstract, but through the choices real people make in real time.
Bringing AM I AI? to the Table
As part of the exchange, each participant contributed something from their own practice. I presented AM I AI?, a speculative and graphic design project I developed to raise awareness about the blurred boundary between human and AI-generated content.
The project started from a simple observation: we're living in a moment where AI can generate faces, voices, articles, and entire identities that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. But the deeper issue isn't just that fakes exist it's that algorithms sort us into bubbles, feeding us content that confirms what we already believe, tailored to push specific agendas to specific groups. The same piece of AI-generated content can show up in your feed looking completely natural, while serving someone else's purpose entirely.
AM I AI? uses satire and visual distortion to make this invisible machinery visible. The project's visual language is built around fragmented human faces, real photographs broken into pixelated grids, overlaid with blocks of deep blue, green, or red. The faces are recognizable but wrong. Familiar but unsettling. That tension is the point: it mirrors the feeling of encountering AI-generated content that looks almost right but isn't quite.
The title itself — "AM I AI?" — is deliberately existential. It flips the usual question. Instead of asking whether the content we see is generated, it asks whether we are the product of the algorithm. Are my opinions mine, or were they assembled for me? The question sounds absurd until you think about it for more than a few seconds.
Design as a Media Literacy Tool
One of the things I advocated for during the exchange and something I feel strongly about is that design and visual culture are underused tools in media literacy education. Young people don't respond well to warnings and fact-sheets. They respond to aesthetics, to humor, to things that feel like they belong in their world.
AM I AI? was designed to live in the same spaces where disinformation thrives: Instagram feeds, bus stop posters, street-level billboards, story formats. The campaign includes social media mockups with captions like "Eyes do lie. This man is not a real person. He is generated." posted on a platform where generated faces already circulate daily without anyone questioning them. The irony is the message.
I also showed how the visual system adapts across color variants, each speaking to a different emotional register while carrying the same underlying message. This is itself a comment on how algorithmic targeting works: same content, different framing, different audience.
The project extends into physical touchpoints too: stickers, hoodies, hangtags, pins, because movements need something tangible. A hoodie that says "AM I AI?" on the back starts a conversation that no slideshow ever could.
What I Took Away
Presenting AM I AI? to an international group was a different experience from showing it in a design context. The questions were less about typography and grid systems and more about impact: How would this work in Georgia, where the media landscape is completely different? Would the satire land in Hungary, where trust in institutions is already low? Does the existential framing risk making people more paranoid rather than more critical?
These are the questions that make a project better. And they're the kind of questions you only get by putting your work in front of people who come from genuinely different realities.
MediaWise YOUth reminded me that media literacy isn't a curriculum, it's a practice. It's the two-second pause before you share something. It's the instinct to ask who benefits if I believe this? Design can help build that instinct. Not by telling people what to think, but by making the invisible structures of manipulation just visible enough to question.
MediaWise YOUth — Skilled & Engaged: Stand Up to Disinformation! was an Erasmus+ project (2025-3-AT01-KA153-YOU-000371698) co-funded by the European Union, hosted by IKIGAI Verein zur Förderung von Kunst, Kultur und Bildung in Vienna, Austria.
Special thanks to Vincent Göke & Taya Rekhova for their contributions and creativity to the AM I AI? project.
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