KI-Bilder und die Widerst\"andigkeit der Medienkonvergenz: Von prim\"arer zu sekund\"arer Intermedialit\"at?

TL;DR

This paper examines the integration of AI-generated images into media convergence, highlighting the complex intermediality stages and the current limitations of seamless integration within various media forms.

Contribution

It offers a nuanced analysis of primary and secondary intermediality concepts, applying them to AI images and discussing their role in social media and fan cultures.

Findings

AI images are not seamlessly integrated into media landscapes.

Current use of AI images is mostly staged and deliberate.

AI image circulation influences media ecology and image interpretation.

Abstract

The article presents some current observations (as of April 10, 2024) on the integration of AI-generated images within processes of media convergence. It draws on two different concepts of intermediality. Primary intermediality concepts are motivated by the object when a new type of technology develops the potential to become socially relevant as a media form and thus a socially, politically, or culturally important communicative factor. Due to their uncertain 'measurements' within the wider media ecology, however, the new, still potential media form appears hybrid. The "inter-" or "between-" of this initial intermediality moment thus refers to the questionable "site" and the questionable description of the potential media form between already existing technologies and cultural forms and their conceptual measurements. For secondary concepts of intermediality, in contrast, it can be assumed that the boundaries of media forms and their application have already been drawn and are reasonably undisputed. This then raises the question of intentional and staged references to AI imagery within other media forms and pictures. The article discusses indicators of both intermediality moments using current examples and controversies surrounding AI images. The thesis is that there can be no talk of a seamless 'integration' of AI images into the wider media landscape at the moment (within films, comic books, or video games, for example) - as one of countless other image production techniques - and that the medial 'site' of AI image circulation - at least where it is not a matter of deception, but rather their conscious use as AI images - especially in social media communication and in fan cultures, but with repercussions for the more general media ecology and image interpretation, insofar as the suspicion that an image could be AI-generated is now increasingly present as a "hermeneutics of suspicion".