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?
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