Keyword – crisis of meaning

Orosz-Réti, Zsófia:

Mixed Metaphors

The article explores images generated by artificial intelligence from a humanities perspective and considers the implications of the new technologies on traditional mechanisms of meaning production. It argues that artificial intelligence has fundamentally reconfigured the taken-for-granted relationships between meaning, recognition and interpretability. To support this claim, after briefly delineating the working mechanisms of AI image generation, the paper turns to photorealistic, idealised representations of the human figure through the logic of Hermann Broch’s kitsch and Freud’s uncanny. Then, it relies on Mark Fisher’s reading of the eerie to analyse AI errors and visual glitches up until the point of complete visual incomprehensibility, suggesting that such experiences are unsettling because they render the absence of a subject palpable. Finally, the paper interprets the phenomenon of Italian brainrot, framing it with Mark Fisher’s understanding of the weird. Rather than understanding the random and impossible combination of visual elements as the tag “brain rot” suggests, in the sense of meaning being irretrievably lost, the article suggests exploring it as a visual practice that, albeit through AI devices, reinscribes human agency while interrogating the cultural and ideological frameworks of meaning-making. The paper concludes by positioning these three aspects of AI-generated imagery within a framework of the shifting relationship between self and other.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, brainrot, crisis of meaning, image generation, uncanny