RT @bildoperationen
The recent wave of pope-related AI images, and the accompanying hot takes about whether or not we've now finally left an era of »visual truth« made me think about the relationship between two modes of online image interpretation: #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification 1/9

The recent wave of pope-related AI images, and the accompanying hot takes about whether or not we've now finally left an era of »visual truth« made me think about the relationship between two modes of online image interpretation: #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification.

Popular versions of #imageforensics have been a staple of social media for some time: People just love to speculate about whether or not a widely shared image has been manipulated. AI images in their current form are a perfect object of such »wild forensis«: Clues that an image was generated are now often so subtle that they're only visible at second glance, but you still don't need any advanced technical skills to find them.

At the same time, AI #imagegeneration seems to be the perfect meme machine: The way it transforms written concepts into memorable images already largely corresponds to the combinatorial logic of memes. What’s more, AI makes it extremely easy to produce endless variations of an already mass-circulated image, effectively combining recognizability and unpredictability.

As social media phenomena, both #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification are part of an online reaction economy, ways of responding to widely circulated images, albeit in almost opposite ways: Either by focusing on meaningless details or by rearranging semantic content. Nevertheless, in many cases both seem related, almost intertwined and reinforcing, resulting in what might be called »image reaction chains«.

So if you were to ask me what these pope-related AI images tell us about our cultural moment, it has nothing to do with »visual truth,« which has always been little more than a myth. Rather, we now see how #ImageReactionChains work in social media, how they are driven both by both the collective desire to discover forensic clues and the joy of reinterpreting semantic content, and how they are now transformed through AI image generation.