Generative AI is often considered a technology of the future, but it is also changing our view of the past. Our digitized cultural memory, made available online, is becoming a resource of patterns that can be aggregated, discriminated, and synthesized into new patterns on a massive scale. The search for patterns in large amounts of data in turn has a history of its own, which is not least a history of the mass availability and circulation of images. Along a visual history of pattern recognition, the lecture outlines a genealogy of the digital present that focuses on the aesthetic and political implications of the current AI hype. (The lecture is in German)
