Attention is All You Want: Machinic Gaze and the Anthropocene

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI-driven computational vision systems interpret and generate representations of the Anthropocene, revealing insights into their role in shaping visual culture and perceptions of ecological futures.

Contribution

It analyzes the emergent machinic gaze in text-to-image AI systems and its implications for understanding human, technical, and ecological narratives in visual culture.

Findings

AI systems produce diverse representations of the Anthropocene.

The machinic gaze reflects and influences human and ecological perceptions.

AI-generated images reveal complex interactions between technology and environmental imaginaries.

Abstract

This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refracted commentary on the preoccupations of Internet visual culture. While the effects of AI on visual culture may themselves be transformative or catastrophic, we are more interested here in how it has been trained to imagine shared human, technical and ecological futures. Through a series of textual prompts that marry elements of the Anthropocenic and Australian environmental vernacular, we examine how this emergent machinic gaze both looks out, through its compositions of futuristic landscapes, and looks back, towards an observing and observed human subject. In its varied assistive, surveillant and generative roles, computational vision not only mirrors human desire but articulates oblique demands of its own.