Martyna - fuzzy fences, shiny coats, trees on fire

In early 2023 an unprecedented number of AI generated images began appearing on social media, ranging from fairly harmless and entertaining ones, like the image of the Pope wearing Balenciaga, to ones with much higher stakes, like the photo of an ‘explosion at the Pentagon’.

While  the  uncanniness [] of the pope wearing Balenciaga produced a sensory reaction,  immediately awaking attention to the high likelihood of its fakeness, the ‘Pentagon event’ didn’t.  The image got shared and reposted, sparking panic and plummeting stocks.

One of the reasons for this sensory absence in this case  is perhaps   the  repetitive and passive  interactions of ‘eyes that have lost their ability to look’ (Buck-Morss, 1992) with the images of catastrophic and  extraordinary events in traditional and social media.  The lack of an acute sensation or  ‘gut feeling’ response to images of catastrophes makes the truth more vulnerable.

Upon confirming that the  image is fake, articles and essays focusing on the dangers of AI-generated images  began appearing online - despite the fact that in the case of this  Pentagon fake, it was not the image itself, but the context of the claim attached to the image that  drew the attention of twitter users.  Arguably the documentary visual  is there not to inform, but to help  generate a state of panic (Steyerl, 2015).

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I would like to propose a different reading  of this ‘ai event’   Away from the techno-doom and towards a definition of new aesthetics of digital facts. In the process I would like to highlight the role of  the modes of perceiving,  investigative gestures and notations, as important aspects of collective sensing and sense-making(Fuller and Weizman, 2021). [Decentering authority of truth comment]

The object of the controversy  (the explosion)  is impossible to disprove or confirm based on the image alone. Instead, further  analysis of  the materiality of the image,  the reality it portrays, and the interactions  of the image as an online artefact need to be taken into account.

Materiality of the image

Upon investigating the images online through reverse  image searching, logging of the  duplicates, comparing and collaging the original with confirmed photos of the pentagon and other known explosions , most of the analyses published on twitter, focused on the glitches within the image,  -the researchers zoomed into high- detail fragments and outlined the boundaries of the impossible geometries they perceived ( the phantasmagorias of the  bending fence with its fuzzy borders,   the delirious architecture of the  facade of the supposed pentagon building)  with brightly coloured rectangles - a visual investigative convention of recording the gesture of organising the perceptual field.[Goodwin]

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Having  the attention drawn to the uncanny artefacts within the image, allows to notice the incoherent reality portrayed by the image: the  agency and circumstance  of the camera that  took the photo,  the strangely  ordered, frontal  framing, the  lack of movement in what one would only expect to be a chaotic scene. The detached, disembodied and neutral perspective and composition could be considered yet another way of echoing AI’s persistent erasure of bias (Steyerl, 2023).

In order  to regain the ability to sense the uncanniness of fake images (whether they are generated by ai, photoshopped, staged or screenshot from war game simulators()), we need to reconsider the structure of digital aesthetics. By seeking out  an ever expanding  network of connections and gestures that extend from the source image we can enable  collective sense-making, akin to a spider casting its web as an extension of its sensory field.

1. I am referring here in particular to misinformation using screenshots of war-simulation game Arma 3, in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine and  Israel’s offensive in Gaza. France 24. (2023). War-themed video game fuels wave of misinformation. [online] Available at: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230102-war-themed-video-game-fuels-wave-of-misinformation.
2. Alemohammad, S., Casco-Rodriguez, J., Luzi, L., Humayun, A.I., Babaei, H., LeJeune, D., Siahkoohi, A. and Baraniuk, R.G. (2023). Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD. [online] arXiv.org. doi:https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.01850.
3. Fuller, M. and Weizman, E. (2021). Investigative Aesthetics. Verso Books.
4. 4. Goodwin, Charles. “Professional Vision.” American Anthropologist, vol. 96, no. 3, Sept. 1994, pp. 606–633, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100/full, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100. Accessed 30 Oct. 2019.