Dreamworlds of Platform Capitalism

Synthetic Media in Networked Image Cultures

Lecture by Roland Meyer

Tue May 14, 2024, 7pm, Room E.O2.29, Neubau, AdBK München

While the ini­tial hype sur­round­ing AI image syn­the­sis mod­els such as Dall‑E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion is fad­ing, their mas­sive impact on net­worked image cul­tures is becom­ing ever clear­er: Social media plat­forms are flood­ed with increas­ing­ly absurd syn­thet­ic click­bait, right-wing online accounts have become super-spread­ers of AI-gen­er­at­ed pro­pa­gan­da, and a per­va­sive dis­trust of dig­i­tal images has pop­u­lar­ized new forms of pseu­do-foren­sic analy­sis.

Taking its cue from these cur­rent phe­nom­e­na, the lec­ture attempts to map the emerg­ing syn­thet­ic real­i­ties of gen­er­a­tive AI, ana­lyze their spe­cif­ic aes­thet­ics, and trace their infra­struc­tur­al con­di­tions. Not only are the visu­al worlds of syn­thet­ic media made to be shared, liked and com­ment­ed on via social media plat­forms – they are in fact a prod­uct of these very plat­forms, their data accu­mu­la­tions, fil­ter aes­thet­ics, reac­tion economies and mon­e­ti­za­tion schemes.

More than any­thing else, AI images may thus rep­re­sent plat­form cap­i­tal­ism itself, albeit in a dream-like state: a closed world com­posed of end­less­ly repeat­ing pat­terns from the past, fueled by con­stant feed­back loops and opti­mized for quan­tifi­able user engage­ment.

Bio

Roland Meyer is a media and visu­al cul­ture schol­ar spe­cial­iz­ing in the his­to­ry and the­o­ry of net­worked image cul­tures. Currently, he is a post­doc researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre Virtual Lifeworlds at Ruhr University Bochum. His most recent pub­li­ca­tion, Bilder unter Verdacht: Praktiken der Bildforensik (Berlin 2023), is a guest edit­ed vol­ume of the series Bildwelten des Wissens, focus­ing on prac­tices of image foren­sics.

Photo: (c) screen­shot DALL‑E/Sam Altman