In 1969, President Nixon had a speech ready in case Apollo 11 ended in tragedy. Fifty years later, artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund brought that speech to life using deepfake video and early AI voice cloning, showing Nixon delivering words he never actually spoke.

Their Emmy Award-winning interactive documentary In Event of Moon Disaster is both a haunting alternate history and a media literacy experiment about how easily the past can be rewritten. We go behind the scenes on the tech, the ethics, and what responsible synthetic media can look like.

We discuss:

* How the project came together at Harvard and MIT

* Why Apollo 11 was the perfect vehicle for this message

* The ethics of demonstrating deepfake danger without becoming misinformation

* Where deepfake detection and media literacy are headed, and their limits

See the project: moondisaster.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedeepfakedialogues.substack.com