Thread by @bildoperationen

The recent wave of pope-related AI images, and the accompanying hot takes about whether or not we've now finally left an era of »visual truth« made me think about the relationship between two modes of online image interpretation: #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification 1/9

Popular versions of image forensics have been a staple of social media for some time: People just love to speculate about whether or not a widely shared image has been manipulated, and to look for hidden clues of tampering. That’s what I call #WildForensis
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AI images in their current form are a perfect object of such #WildForensis: Clues that an image was generated are now often so subtle that they're only visible at second glance. But you still don't need any technical skills to find them, they are usually hidden in plain sight
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At the same time, AI image generation seems to be the perfect tool for #InstantMemeification: The way it transforms written concepts, e.g. »The Pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer coat«, into memorable images already largely corresponds to the combinatorial logic of memes
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What’s more, AI makes it extremely easy to produce endless variations of an already mass-circulated image based on the recombination of visual and textual concepts, effectively combining recognizability and unpredictability: Image generation is essentially a meme machine
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As social media phenomena, both #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification are part of an online reaction economy, ways of responding to images by reinterpretation, albeit in almost opposite ways: Either by focusing on meaningless details or by rearranging semantic content
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Nevertheless, in many cases #WildForensis and #InstantMemeification seem related, almost intertwined, as mutually reinforcing collective modes of reacting to widely circulated visual content, resulting together in what might be called #ImageReactionChains.
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So if you were to ask me what these pope-related AI images tell us about our cultural moment, it has nothing to do with »visual truth«, which has always been little more than a myth and was already abandoned for good with Photoshop more than 30 years ago
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Rather, we are now clearly witnessing how #ImageReactionChains dominate social media, how they are driven by both the collective desire to discover forensic clues and the joy of reinterpreting semantic content, and how they are now being transformed by AI image generation
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