Synthetic Realities. Generative AI and Digital Visual Literacy

As social media platforms are flooded with AI-generated visual content, further blurring the lines between recorded footage and virtual worlds, previous understandings of realism and visual truth are being renegotiated along the lines of platform economies and politics. New forms of digital visual literacy are required to navigate these emergent synthetic realities.

The project focuses on AI-generated images and videos explicitly containing or implicitly referencing religious themes, iconographies, or modes of representation. We approach these in two ways: Firstly, by analyzing their aesthetic structures, formats and genres, as well as their inherent ideological implications, and, secondly, by studying how they are perceived amid shifting notions of visual truth.

We argue that the infrastructural conditions of AI image generation often replicate and reinforce visual stereotypes. Therefore, special attention is given to how religion is deployed as a marker of identity and otherness, and how young adults interpret and negotiate these portrayals. In doing so, we seek to go beyond a focus on disinformation operating within a binary logic of ‘real’ and ‘fake’. Instead, we aim to examine how AI-generated visual content is used to elicit affective responses and thereby alter and amplify pre-existing perceptions of reality.

Combining media- and actor-centered approaches, the project employs methods of digital ethnography and visual culture studies as well as qualitative empirical methods. The research material consists of AI-generated visual content on selected social media platforms as well as online comments, discussions and further social media practices and contexts in which they are embedded.