"The Wind and the Song" Pt. 1: The Treachery of A.I. Images

Lewis Heriz
Lewis Heriz
In this video essay, Lewis Heriz questions what we're really looking at, or listening to, when we encounter the outputs of generative AI systems.…
Brightly-coloured shapes contain a pop-art rendering of a tobacco pipe with the words 'Ceci n'est pas une'

Increasingly they surround us. Images, music, voices. But what are we really looking at, or listening to, when we encounter the outputs of generative AI systems?

In the first of a series of video essays as part of our 'Speaking Machines' strand, Lewis Heriz explores the treachery of AI images.

This video essay - lighthearted in style but serious in intent - opens a discussion about the difference between media produced by humans, and those produced by generative AI systems; when those artefacts are increasingly otherwise indistinguishable from one another.

This point of difference is the key to making sense of a world where the systems of communication - that we develop for the purposes of constructing meaning - are being ever more governed by computer software expressly designed to output media that have the highest probability of passing as human.

I begin this first part of the series using René Magritte's classic 1929 painting 'The Treachery of Images' - a deceptively simple work of surrealist semiotics, which, as it nears its centenary, still encapsulates and reveals a core quality of the human experience.