Ingrid Moosbrugger: The Scrubbed Tale of a Soap Opera Pioneer

How I Used AI to Bring a 15-Year Long Wikipedia Hoax to Life

I created this project for my Design and Future of Publishing course. We were asked to choose a hoax that somehow made its way onto Wikipedia and create a project about it using mainly AI to convince people (our classmates and professor) that our hoax is real. I chose Rough Crossing mainly to see what creative writing—or fake non-fiction writing—AI could put out.

I focused on one “actress”, Ingrid Moosbrugger, and came up with my own fake backstory about her being a biracial queer woman who dealt with backlash due to her character falling in love with another female main character. As such, Rough Crossing was removed from air and its recordings destroyed. Years later, Ingrid Moosbrugger reveals the truth in her memoir to capitalize on the lost media craze.

The text and images were all AI generated, though I edited them in Photoshop and Figma to add text, grain, and other effects. I designed the slideshow in Figma, but utilized a template for the blog posts. What I found most interesting about this project, were the similarities in the images of Ingrid. Obviously, she doesn’t look completely the same in every image, but I found that the tools I used were so insistent on giving her a similar look (most likely due to a lack of racial diversity in materials they were parsing) that I didn’t have to fight with the image generators too long when prompting. It is impressive that Pi can write a book, but I don’t think it will completely erase the colorfulness of the human mind and voice. For example, I didn’t find the blog posts to read as casually as a blog post from a young actress in the 2000s working twelve-hour days should (at least, in my mind). It was hard for Pi to stay in character.

Overall, this project was useful in giving an idea of how AI generally functions when it comes to creating, or replicating, art and narratives.

This is the only one of my projects I utilized AI for. You can check out the PDF and read some of the preliminary research I did, here.