@skjethani.bsky.social
@danielpfurtscheller.at
@kathchr.bsky.social
@klobinger.bsky.social
@tjthomson.bsky.social
@neous.bsky.social

As visual generative AI rapidly transforms our visual culture, our book proposes six interdisciplinary perspectives to understand three interconnected realities of AI-generated images: their sociotechnical fabrics, their semiotic interfaces, and their representations and aesthetics.

Our co-edited open access book with @catherinebouko.bsky.social, Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images, now has a cover and critics’ reviews 📘 ✨ www.routledge.com/Six-Critical...

📣 New! Around the world, AI-generated deepfakes are being used to enable financial fraud — and they're causing serious harm. Our policy brief w @columbiasipa.bsky.social unpacks the limits of current regulations & underscores the need for institutional accountability. datasociety.net/library/deep...

VCSD Travel Grant Application #ICA26 Calling all students and emerging scholars! The ICA Visual Communication Studies Division (VCSD) leadership team is now accepting applications for our annual travel grants. The Klaus Krippendorff Mem...

Calling all students and emerging scholars‼️ 📣
#ICA26 #CapeTown 🇿🇦 @icahdq.bsky.social

If you are currently a #student or #ECR and your paper has been accepted at #ICA26 Cape Town, you may apply for #VCSD travel grant by submitting your details through this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Fake AI Content About the Iran War Is All Over X X’s Grok is failing to accurately verify video footage from the Iran conflict and is sharing its own AI-generated images about the war.

X’s Grok is failing to accurately verify video footage from the Iran conflict and is sharing its own AI-generated images about the war. www.wired.com/story/fake-a...

Gaza and the rise of synthetic militarism: On genocide and generative AI - Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein, 2026 Drawing on the case of the Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza, with attention to how Israelis and their supporters were employing synthetic images as political t...

❕"Gaza and the rise of synthetic militarism: On genocide and generative AI" by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L Stein just out in Media, Culture & Society:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

X Will Stop Paying People for Sharing Unlabeled AI-Generated War Footage Fake war footage is a problem as old as social media. AI has just supercharged it.

AI-generated war footage is becoming a problem, X is taking a stand against it by *checks notes* demonetizing bluechecks for 90 days when they share it without a label?

New article on prophets and AI (with Amanda Lagerkvist and Blazenka Scheuer)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’...

“The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives.
Several describe video material showing bathroom visits, sex…”

📣 #CallForApplications #CfA

The SCRIPTS Academic Accelerator #Fellowship 2026 is open for 2nd & 3rd year #PhD #researchers from regions and communities underrepresented in academia. Join us for 12 months in #Berlin.

⏰ Deadline: 28 Feb 2026
💶 Funding: €1,800/month
👉 ogy.de/bz4q
🙌 Please share!

How Doubt Became a Weapon in Iran AI manipulation, and the very suspicion of it, serves those who have the most to hide.

After decades of undermining the credibility of dissent, the Iranian regime now "has AI not just as a tool for creating fakes but as a rhetorical weapon." The sense that nothing can be trusted becomes an accelerant. (And not only in Iran.) www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

AI is not a tool - AI & SOCIETY AI & SOCIETY -

“According to AI companies, creativity isn’t an innate human endeavor, but a problem, an inefficiency waiting for a technological intervention…Such rhetoric conveniently abstracts creativity from a complex, embodied human experience & represents it as a computational problem to be solved.”

I argue that there is a tripartite structure to these slop slogans:

1. Creativity is defined as a territory to be conquered.
2. AI is presented as a tool for this conquest.
3. Present-day concerns are dismissed as obstacles to an inevitable, AI-driven future.

2/2

A long rainbow ribbon feeds into a grey meat grinder bearing a simplified neural network diagram on its side. Out the other end spills a collection of black and white 1s and 0s.

My piece “AI is not a tool” is out in AI & Society. The tool metaphor is all over AI industry rhetoric that markets visual #genAI as the solution to your creative needs doi.org/10.1007/s001... 1/2

Image credit: Beckett LeClair / betterimagesofai.org / CC BY 4.0

#CfP! Special Visual Essays Issue on More-than-Human Perspectives in Visual Communication, guest edited by Juhri Salamet. Extended abstracts due 20 January 2026. More information: www.designresearchsociety.org/events/cfp-s...

Whose imagination? Conflicting narratives and sociotechnical futures of visual generative AI - AI & SOCIETY Conceptually informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, this article asks how visual generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is viewed by those who adopt or resist this technology, and why, drawing evidence from YouTube discussions. Firstly, visual genAI is framed as a natural progression of technologies that enhance creativity, increase productivity, and democratize art, echoing the prevailing narratives of Silicon Valley. Secondly, visual genAI is discussed in relation to critical concerns such as job displacement, no compensation for artists, and the rise of industrial art. Despite these divergent viewpoints, a collective effort to negotiate ethical AI adoption emphasizes accountability from AI companies, updates to existing regulatory frameworks, and alternative solutions to reclaim the human element in genAI cultures. The findings suggest that while visual genAI can indeed enhance creative practices, data value extraction must be repudiated to prevent market power concentration by those who frame this technology as a tool for the imagination while excluding the creators whose work these “tools” are built on. The article offers empirical insights into how different social groups advocate for or resist visual genAI, stimulating critical debate on its status and integration into cultural production and society at large.

New in AI & Society: how visual generative artificial intelligence #genAI is viewed by those who adopt or resist this technology, and why. doi.org/10.1007/s001...

Screenshot of the article part where proposed action is described. It reads as follows: Proposed action AI image generation platforms must implement clear transparency systems that automatically identify and credit the artistic styles or cultural works being replicated in generated outputs. There should be more focus on the development of alternative prompting frameworks that encourage creative exploration rather than simple replication of the styles of the living artists.

How do we prevent AI companies from enabling uncredited mimicry of culture in AI-generated images? Some answers at
www.acume.org/r/beyond-mag.... Click ➕ for evidence and actionable steps.

Based on my 2024 study in New Media & Soc doi.org/10.1177/1461...
#criticalAI #generativeAI #noAIart

Computer-mediated representations: a qualitative examination of algorithmic vision and visual style - TJ Thomson, 2025 To the general public, text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, seem to work through magic and, indeed, their inner workings are often frustrati...

🔗 The open-access study can be read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🙏 Thanks to @nataliialaba.com for inspiring this study and to she and @neous.bsky.social for organising a panel on visual style that we presented at #ADDA5 and that helped sharpen my arguments in this paper.

What a delight it was to work with @danielpfurtscheller.at, @klobinger.bsky.social, @nataliialaba.com, & @kathchr.bsky.social on this newly published study: Visual literacies in transition: multimodal co-production with generative AI.

🔗 You can read our open access study here: lnkd.in/gZwZr83g

Pre-register: VCSD Q&A on Zoom (Oct 2) EARLY CAREER AND INTERNATIONAL SUBMISSIONS Q&A FOR #ICA26 Join the upcoming Q&A Zoom Event organized by the ICA Visual Communication Studies Division (VCSD) to know more about our call for abstracts ...

When: October 2, at 8:00 AM GMT
Register: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @tjthomson.bsky.social

Early career and international submissions Q&A for #ICA26
@icahdq.bsky.social

Join the upcoming Q&A Zoom Event organized by the ICA Visual Communication Studies Division (VCSD) to know more about our call for abstracts and papers in response to the theme "Communication and Inequalities in Context"

Thanks so much for reading and spreading the word.

Memory of the multitude and representation in AI-generated images of war Abstract This study addresses how AI-generated images of war are changing the making of memory. Instead of asking how AI-generated images affect individual recall, we focus on how they communicate specific representations, recognising that such portrayals can cultivate particular assumptions and beliefs. Drawing on memory of the multitude, visual social semiotics, and cultivation/desensitisation theories, we analyse how visual generative AI mediates the representation of the Russia-Ukraine war. Our corpus includes 200 images of the Russia-Ukraine war generated from 23 prompts across proprietary and open-source visual generative AI systems. The findings indicate that visual generative AI tends to present a sanitised view of the war. Critical aspects, such as death, injury, and suffering of children and refugees are often excluded. Furthermore, a disproportional focus on urban areas misrepresents the full scope of the war. Visual generative AI, we argue, introduces a new dimension to memory making in that it blends documentation with speculative fiction by synthesising the multitude embedded within the visual memory of war archives, historical biases, representational limitations, and commercial risk aversion. By foregrounding the socio-technical and discursive dimensions of synthetic war content, this study contributes to an interdisciplinary dialogue on collective memory at the intersection of visual communication studies, media studies, and memory studies by providing empirical insights into how generative AI mediates the visual representation of war through human-archival-mechanistic entanglements. Keywords: visual generative AI; AI-generated images; memory of the multitude; war representation

New study in Memory, Mind & Media: "Memory of the multitude and representation in AI-generated #images of #war;
#AI and #Memory special collection. doi.org/10.1017/mem....

#criticalAI @universitypress.cambridge.org

Our article in Memory, Mind & Media argues that that AI-generated images of the Russia-Ukraine war create an
unreliable ‘clean war’ narrative that systematically excludes human suffering and the
experiences of civilians, women, children, and the elderly.

Visual AI Politics//Politics of Visual AI Graphic Recording - Digital Society Research Cluster As part of the 2025 Digital Politics Summer School, we held a roundtable discussion exploring Visual AI Politics//Politics of Visual AI. In case you missed it, you can watch the […]

Some of my thoughts on the politics of visual generative #AI documented in a beautiful graphic recording in the 2025 Digital Politics Summer School curated by the Digital Society research group at The Manchester Metropolitan University 😍 digitalsociety.mmu.ac.uk/2025/09/03/v...

12ICOM conference poster

Preparations are in full swing and we look forward to welcoming everyone in Groningen soon for #12ICOM:
12th International Conference on Multimodality
29-31 October 2025, House of Connections, Groningen
bit.ly/12ICOM
Watch our website for the full program to be online soon!

Visual AI politics/politics of visual AI: a roundtable - Digital Society Research Cluster Location: online This roundtable brings together experts on digital media, visual cultures and politics, misinformation, political violence, and generative AI. Curated by Adi Kuntsman and Jessica Elia...

I'm part of roundtable "𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬/𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜" on 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟮𝟳, 𝟵:𝟬𝟬–𝟭𝟭:𝟯𝟬 𝗮𝐦 (𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞) – with Miriyam Aouragh, Roger Canals, Donatella Della Ratta, and Yoav Galai – hope to see you there! digitalsociety.mmu.ac.uk/event/visual...

Visual AI politics/politics of visual AI: Digital Politics Summer School 2025 24-27 June, online Our Digital Politics Summer School is celebrating its fifth anniversary! This year, the school is focusing on visual generative AI. Details of speakers, call for workshop participat...

The program and (free) registration for online 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 "𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 / 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜", 𝟮𝟰-𝟮𝟳 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲, are available! digitalpoliticsmanmet.bloggi.co/visual-ai-po...

Nataliia Laba on text-to-image generation

Nataliia Laba @nataliialaba.com on text-to-image generators, the resulting artefacts and our interpretation.

Her food for thought:
Can human qualities really be translated to AI?
We should continue addressing how people's experiences shape their expectations towards AI.