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The Rumour Mill: Making the Spread of Misinformation Explicit and Tangible

Misinformation spread presents a technological and social threat to society. With the advance of AI-based language models, automatically generated texts have become difficult to identify and easy to create at scale. We present "The Rumour Mill", a playful art piece, designed as a commentary on the spread of rumours and automatically-generated misinformation. The mill is a tabletop interactive machine, which invites a user to experience the process of creating believable text by interacting with different tangible controls on the mill. The user manipulates visible parameters to adjust the genre and type of an automatically generated text rumour. The Rumour Mill is a physical demonstration of the state of current technology and its ability to generate and manipulate natural language text, and of the act of starting and spreading rumours.