When I started considering an image for the conference CFP months ago, I was faced with the prevalence of AI in current mediated discourse. With a hesitant, but scholarly interest, I wanted to see how it can interpret the complex idea of “mediating the moment.” Of course, it couldn’t, producing images of “people” with poorly executed limbs. Due to this abstraction, I added additional terms to guide the result into something even more abstract adding words in small groups and saving results. The groups being: “technology mediating the moment social sciences galaxy world” and then the addition of “red and yellow humanities art” to this group. I merged the results of these two searches to create the final image. A human intervention, in something inhuman. You’ll notice that it gives itself away. What looks to maybe be a connected network of cities in the night or a circuit board is really just a randomized collection of lines. Is that light supposed to be the sun?

Due to the ethical implications of AI, this is the only experiment I ran. Other images that occasionally appear throughout the website were included within Photoshop’s generated options provided in the same results.

– Hunter