Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images Catherine Bouko 9781041232698

This book offers six critical, interdisciplinary approaches to AI-generated images. It invites the reader to (re-)imagine relationships between artefacts and media, authorship and agency, creativity and commodification, representation and visual style. Across the chapters, the book examines three realities of AI images, from sociotechnical fabrics, through semiotic interfaces, to representations and aesthetics.

Drawing on media studies, philosophy of technology, multimodality studies, critical AI studies, and visual communication studies, the book pursues the following interconnected topics: (1) addressing pataphysical and sociomaterial engagements with AI image making, (2) theorising distributed and probabilistic forms of agency through the concept of vector agency, (3) analysing interfaces and affordances of visual generative AI via multimodal walkthroughs, (4) conceptualising prompting as a cultural practice that reshapes agency, (5) mapping representational patterns and emerging visual genres in AI-generated imagery, and (6) interrogating how visual AI styles are co-produced by machines, users, and generative platform politics. These six critical lenses offer complementary perspectives to understanding the complex ecosystem surrounding AI image production.

Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images is intended for scholars, graduate students, and practitioners working with visual generative AI in both analytical and creative contexts. Ultimately, the book calls for a reflexive and responsible engagement with increasingly AI-mediated visual culture. gly AI-mediated visual culture.

Catherine Bouko is Associate Professor in Communication and French at Ghent University (Belgium). Her primary research centers on image-based communication, particularly in the context of extremism, feminism, and citizenship on social media, as well as the emergence of AI-generated visuals. In 2024, she published the open-access book Visual Citizenship. Communicating political opinions and emotions on social media (Routledge). Her research approaches genAI through a feminist lens, highlighting the power dynamics embedded in these emerging digital visual cultures.

Nataliia Laba is Assistant Professor in Digital and Multimodal Communication / Humane AI at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Nataliia studies visual generative AI, with a strong focus on society technology relationships in the context of technology adoption and use. Her research asks critical questions about AI's sociotechnical imaginaries and collective memory mediated by AI. Nataliia's work has been published in New Media & Society, AI & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Memory, Mind & Media, Journal of Visual Literacy, and Discourse & Communication.