Finally online: My essay on #PlatformRealism for #Transbordeur. There couldn't be a more appropriate week to publish it, even though when I wrote it last year I couldn't have imagined the extent to which AI slop would become the aesthetic of a new fascism. This essay is a kind of summary of the ideas about #PlatformRealism that I've been mainly developing on various online platforms over the past few years. Reading it now feels a little weird: I think most of the ideas are still valid, but only now are their political implications becoming clear.
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https://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/2299?lang=en

This campaign, which can now be seen all over Zurich, is one of the most irritating uses of AI imagery I have encountered so far: In different variations, we see generic, more or less 'photo-realistic' images of smiling children in front of badly damaged buildings, transformed into QR codes with the help of ControlNet. The slogan «This QR code creates real Christmas miracles» seems to be an almost cynical comment on the obvious fake «miracles» in the image, both the synthetic, AI-generated smiles of the children and the «miraculous» transformation of ruins into digital code. This kind of fundraising campaign has always relied on fairly generic stock images, and perhaps the use of AI for this purpose is only a logical consequence. But the obvious artificiality on display here, the shameless blend of sappy sentimentality and digital trickery, seems to me to take it to a new level
#PlatformRealism

AI image synthesis proves to be the perfect tool for fascist propaganda: by recombining and merging visual clichés, it allows mere slogans to be transformed into visible scenarios and reality to be customised to one's own preconceived ideological description
#PlatformRealism #ImageGeneration

As we learn more and more about how Facebook is spammed with AI-generated clickbait, one of the mysteries surrounding these images remains the prevalence of religious content – epitomized by the now infamous »Shrimp Jesus.« What's going on here?
#ImageGeneration #PlatformRealism
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An aesthetic of continuous flow unites many of today's most prominent visual phenomena, be it drone footage, video games, digital SFX, and now AI videos. Each image glides almost effortlessly into the next. Spatial control seems unrestricted, every conceivable viewpoint can be taken, and gravity no longer plays a role. Time can be stretched, reversed, looped, and modulated without consequences; visual coherence trumps the logic of cause and effect, and any temporal sequence can be seamlessly connected to any other sequence. It's the dreamworld of platform capitalism
#PlatformRealism #ImageGeneration #Sora

The evangelical »He Gets Us« ad which aired during the Super Bowl made quite a buzz. Many pointed out that the photos of people washing each other's feet looked suspiciously like AI-generated images. There is a specific look that many now recognize as typical of AI: an intense glow emanating from the center of the image, smooth surfaces, saturated colors, and a high dynamic range, as well as an artificial hyper-realism that borders on the dreamlike. Meanwhile, the artist behind the series has spoken out, describing how each photo took days to create.
The look of extreme artificiality almost automatically associated with AI today is, in fact, much older. Variants can already be found in what Jörg Colberg has analyzed in a brilliant essay entitled »Photography’s Neoliberal Realism«, for example in the work of Gregory Crewdson (which almost looks like a blueprint for the Super Bowl ad, with some Watchtower vibes added for Christian flavour). For quite some time now, some of the most ambitious photographers have produced images that are supposed to look less like photographs and more like 19th-century historical paintings or Hollywood film stills.
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#ImageGeneration #PlatformRealism