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

Spread of misinformation presents a technological and so-
cial threat to society. With the advance of AI-based lan-
guage models, automatically generated texts have be-
come 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 parame-
ters to adjust the genre and type of an automatically gener-
ated text rumour. The Rumour Mill is a physical demonstra-
tion of the state of NLP technology and its ability to gener-
ate and manipulate natural language text, and of the act of
starting and spreading rumours.