What is the future of photography and the gaze when confronted with the emerging world of Artificial Intelligence? Within anyone’s reach, AI technologies show that the future of the image lies not in the eyes but in machine learning techniques (machine learning).
Apps such as FaceApp, DeepNude and Lensa belong to this generation of new trends. They are tools for people who take photographs with their phones and use Instagram. In other words, they are apps targeting an audience of millions. They share the use of Artificial Intelligence and computer vision to create images of what might have happened in a future that never was.
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The potential use of these apps to collect data and store patterns for surveillance or other forms of manipulation has been widely reported. My point is different. I ask how these apps respond to a moment that, despite technology’s planned obsolescence and the institutional collapse of cultural infrastructure, insists on being eternally “youthful.”
We have abolished “the past as past,” said philosopher Peter Pelbart, or at least the past as we knew it: an inheritance both received and constructed. On one hand, “tomorrow is today,” as we learned from the Museum of Tomorrow’s slogan (itself on the verge of being strangled, which makes it all the more ironic).
On the other, given increasingly frequent ecological catastrophes, human-caused climate change, and the exponential growth of technological waste produced daily, perhaps we will actually have nothing to preserve. In this sense, as the French historian Henri-Pierre Jeudy stated, “what is driving preservation for the future is no longer the anguish of losing traces, but the fear of having nothing to pass on.”