Knack: Dare to doubt

Usually, we wouldn’t put words in your mouth, but for this project, we quite literally had to. This campaign aimed to challenge voters to (re)consider their political opinions by leveraging artificial intelligence. Users could upload their photos, which were then animated to appear as though they were making specific political statements. This unique experience, accessible through a website, provided a powerful way for voters to engage with political content.

The technical production of this digital experience was entirely done by our team at nocomputer. Our goal was to create a user-friendly platform that seamlessly integrated front- and back-end systems. This ensured that users had a smooth experience when interacting with the AI tool.

To bring the AI component to life and generate a deepfake in a matter of minutes, we set up the following pipeline:

• Selfie time: Users log in, take a selfie, and choose a party and accompanying statement.
• Lipsync: To make a convincing deepfake, the lipsyncing part is key. We used Sadtalker to ensure this would be as realistic as possible.
• AI voice: As voice cloning would lead us too far in this project, we used Synthesia to provide AI-generated voices (female and male voice).
• Video generation and cloud rendering: We put everything together: your selfie, lipsync and AI voice to generate the video. We did this through Beam.cloud (for cloud GPU rendering)
• Ping ping ping: Deepfake incoming! The result is shown to the user and also emailed to them.

Et voilà. We had everything in place to provoke introspection.

Provoking introspection

While traditional ‘political tests’ are usually to find out which party’s viewing points match yours best, this one did something entirely different. The key objective of this campaign was to provoke introspection among voters, encouraging them to make more informed decisions, not to direct voters towards a particular party. Do you still agree with certain statements when you see them coming out of your own mouth?

Jesse Van Gysel, Creative Director at Mutant, explains, “Most political tests are designed to eliminate doubt, providing a clear party recommendation. Knack/LeVif aims to inform, provide insight, and equip users with tools to form their own opinions.”

The campaign ran across various media channels including TV, cinema, radio, online, and print, ensuring broad reach and impact.