2023 | 37

Browsing 2023 | 37 by Subject "AI avatar design"

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  • Article
    AI Body Images and the Meta-Human: On the Rise of AI-generated Avatars for Mixed Realities and the Metaverse.
    Scorzin, Pamela C. (2023) , S. 179-194
    In this paper, I discuss the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on contemporary visual culture, mainly on the human (body) imagery and the forming of AI avatar design for social media and beyond, i.e., for mixed realities and the Metaverse. What kind of representations of humans does Artificial Intelligence generate? I use AI imagery as an umbrella term, including prompt engineering. What do algorithmic images created by contemporary AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL·E 2, or Stable Diffusion, among others, represent? What kind of reality do they depict? And to which ideologies and contemporary body concepts do they refer? Moreover, we can observe a visual paradox herein: The more realistic the AI images created by GANs and Diffusion models within AI image generators now appear, the less clear becomes their reference to reality and any truth content. However, what synthetic images created by intelligent algorithms depict is seen as something other than unreal and fictitious since what becomes visible refers to information minted from the metadata of vast amounts of circulating images (on the internet). Making the invisible visible and distributing it via digital platforms becomes the act of communicating with AI images that ‘inform’ and affect their recipients by creating real resonance. The timeline of this new photo-based imaging technology points more to the future than to the present and past. Thus, AI images as meta-images can represent a different form or level of reality in a simulated photo-realistic style that functions as effective visual rhetoric for globally networked communities of the present. Moreover, in the age of cooperation and co-creation between man and machine within complex networks, the designing process can now start just with the command line prompt “/imagine” (Midjourney) – transforming the following text/ekphrases into an operative means of design/artistic productions. AI images are thus also operative images turning into a new technology-based visual language emerging from a large technological network. As networked images and meta-images, they can fabricate and fabulate the meta-human.