talking to an article
[very well written by the modern savant Ruby Justice Thelot – 22 Dec 2025, New York for Ocula ]
me: "ways to deal w AI generated imgs: being creative humans in ways AI gets in trouble with, imperfect but "just/correct" to the viewer's eye, have fun The credibility of images is indeed shaken, even shredded to death, which is a good thing for cultivating visual and ethical judgement... Original image lineage/provenance is a call for research and knowledge "
Hito Steyerl: Technology Has Destroyed Reality The New York Times, Dec 5, 2018
Ruby J Thelot "The Death of the Image Has Made Us Wake up to Reality" :
"The AI-image represents a rupture in the role of images (something many artists and theorists have tried to grapple with this year, including Hito Steyerl in her recent book Medium Hot). This theory captures something materially observable: that once humanity acquired the capacity to produce images, it did not—and, most importantly, could not—stop."
Images had a good run. For around 75,000 years, we used them to create representations of our physical world. Images were tools of ‘mimesis’ aiming to represent nature. In around 340–322 BCE, Aristotle wrote in De Memoria et Reminiscentia of images as a medium of recollection. However, he also warned us in De Insomniis, another short work in the collection Parva Naturalia, about the potential for the dream-image to mislead, because the dream-image can be indistinguishable from waking perception. The soul, deprived of corrective sensory input, accepts images as if they were real. Though he was writing specifically about sleep and dreams, Aristotle intuits what later philosophers will identify, which is that images possess phenomenological force independent of truth...
A two-thousand-and-twenty-fifth-year marked (plagued, even) by AI is the result of this attitude, and in many instances the direct product of the companies (from Meta to Amazon to Google) developed in the innovation optimism period. But after blinking away the sleep from our eyes and seeing where this ‘progression’ has got us, many people are starting to scan for an emergency exit (or at least, a different way to interact with the tools that we’ve been given)...
This crisis is what happens when the image is free from authorship and relationship to reality, when it is fully emancipated and transformed into a new entity, closer to Aristotle’s concept of the dream-image, an image with no relation to the material world...
by Ruby Justice Thelot – 22 Dec 2025, New York
Full essay:
https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/death-of-the-image-has-made-us-wake-up-to-reality/
