#rp25 speaker Roland Meyer: Generative AI and the aesthetics of digital fascism

Digital fascism loves generative AI: Trump and Musk share masses of AI-generated images and videos on their platforms, and the AfD has also long recognised the benefits of Midjourney & Co. for election campaigns. This is no coincidence, as the technology is not a politically neutral tool.

Generative AI is based on the mass appropriation and devaluation of creative labour, it reproduces and reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes, and it is structurally nostalgic. This is because it relies on images of the past to generate an image of the present or even the future. This makes it compatible with a global right that yearns for a past that exists only in images.

Can there be an emancipatory approach to generative AI at all? Or are AI-generated visual worlds clearly and irrevocably coded to the right? And what other images can be set against the aesthetics of digital fascism?

Roland Meyer is an image and media scholar and DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and the Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). His research focuses on the history, theory and aesthetics of synthetic media, operative images and algorithmically networked image cultures. His book 'Gesichtserkennung' was published in 2021 in the series Digitale Bildkulturen by Wagenbach.