Digital Mythopoetics and Educational Futures: Archaeological Analysis of AI Image Generation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum in the Age of AI: Digital Mythopoetics, Media Literacies, and Futurisms

Abstract

Using a combination of Flashpoint Epistemology, Morrisonian Africanist presence, Wynterian mythopoetics, and Foucauldian historiographical strategies to analyze AI and non-AI generated images and videos, this analysis uses resonance and reverberation as theoretical tools in identifying historical conceptual structures present in images today but that without confirmation of intent or the type of training data used might be easily dismissed as non-existent. What appears to the user as a "new" and "original" picture is actually an algorithmically mediated collection of previous pictures and words that get mixed and remixed together. Post-structural archeological analysis of AI outputs can excavate sedimented histories and power structures that they carry even without access to the data that AI uses to train.

Author

• Sarah Ishmael, University of Wisconsin - Madison