Article: The New Value of the Archive: AI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’
Abstract
Text-to-image generators such as DALL·E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Dif- fusion promise to produce any image on command, thus transforming mere ekphrasis into an operational means of production. Yet, despite their seeming magical control over the results of image generation, prompts should not be understood as instructions to be carried out, but rather as generative search commands that direct AI models to specific regions within the stochastic spaces of possible images. In order to analyze this relationship between the prompt and the image, a productive comparison can be made with stock photography. Both stock photography databases and text-image generators rely on text descriptions of visual content, but while stock photography searches can only find what has already been produced and described, prompts are used to find what exists only as a latent possibility. This fundamentally changes the way value is ascribed to individual images. AI image generation fosters the emergence of a new net- worked model of visual economy, one that does not rely on closed, indexed image archives as monetizable assets, but rather conceives of the entire web as a freely available resource that can be mined at scale. Whereas in the older model each image has a precisely determinable value, what DALL·E, Midjourney, and Sta- ble Diffusion monetize is not the individual image itself, but the patterns that emerge from the aggregation and analysis of large ensembles of images. And maybe the most central category for accessing these models, the essay argues, has become a transformed, de-hierarchized, and inclusive notion of ‘style’: for these models, everything, individual artistic modes of expression, the visual stereotypes of commercial genres, as well as the specific look of older technical media like film or photography, becomes a recognizable and marketable ‘style’, a repeatable visual pattern extracted from the digitally mobilized images of the past.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Meyer, Roland: The New Value of the Archive: AI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’. In: IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, Jg. 19 (2023), Nr. 1, S. 100-111. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/22314.
@ARTICLE{Meyer2023,
author = {Meyer, Roland},
title = {The New Value of the Archive: AI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/22314}",
volume = 19,
address = {Köln},
journal = {IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft},
number = 1,
pages = {100--111},
}
author = {Meyer, Roland},
title = {The New Value of the Archive: AI Image Generation and the Visual Economy of ‘Style’},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/22314}",
volume = 19,
address = {Köln},
journal = {IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft},
number = 1,
pages = {100--111},
}
The item has been published with the following license: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz