Fall Institute: 'Iconoclasm in the Age of AI' (New York City)

The ascent of AI has both been fuelled by and produced a steady proliferation of images, which disturb not only through their sheer number, but due to their very nature. On the one hand, the images unsettle through their undeniable verisimilitude, sparking concerns about deep fakes, forgery, trust etc. in both political and personal domains. On the other hand, AI images disrupt through their uncanny quality, their mixture of hyper-realism and crude inaccuracy, which seems to manifest an intelligence parasitic upon and yet very much not our own. The increasing omnipresence of such images suggests that we think of AI image-cultures themselves as iconoclastic phenomena, but one occurring within the realm of image-production itself: a set of fundamental challenges to our understanding of the politics and ontology of images and associated preconceptions about originality, creativity, accuracy and representation.