How and Where Do AI-Generated Images Become Significant in Societies?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) currently generates a syntax of images in order to display visual communication in an appellative way by means of algorithmic aesthetics. This computer-assisted image production raises the following question: how and where do AI-generated images become meaningful to viewers in societies? The invention of generative AI for images, however, seems to undermine the authorship of the actors because both the subject and the pictorial syntax appear to be almost automated and democratized. As with the camera, the creative level of an image-generation enabling medium is not determined by intelligent technology, but by the visual-communicative competence of the actors. AI images are integrated into complex, hybrid, and digital networks. These networks of image communication use both human actors and intelligent image machines to generate information, to cooperate, and to develop syntactic forms by means of co-creation. In the age of their digital producibility, images occur in such masses that, at best, an AI can comprehensively order, store, or process them. Thus, AI often processes images that neither for individuals nor for societies were, are, or will become significant. If, however, AI were to generate all technically possible images, then societies could, at best, attach significance to them in isolated cases. Furthermore, although AI analyzes individual contexts of use, the principally open meaning of images obstructs the attribution of what images subjectively mean to their recipients. Hence, this study uncovers the answer to this question: what are the opportunities and risks of visual communication by means of images when an AI tools is involved?