Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images

Catherine Bouko is Associate Professor in Communication and French at Ghent University (Belgium). Her primary research centers on image-based communication, particularly in the context of extremism, feminism, and citizenship on social media, as well as the emergence of AI-generated visuals. In 2024, she published the open-access book Visual Citizenship. Communicating political opinions and emotions on social media (Routledge). Her research approaches genAI through a feminist lens, highlighting the power dynamics embedded in these emerging digital visual cultures.Nataliia Laba is Assistant Professor in Digital and Multimodal Communication / Humane AI at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Nataliia studies visual generative AI, with a strong focus on society↔technology relationships in the context of technology adoption and use. Her research asks critical questions about AI’s sociotechnical imaginaries and collective memory mediated by AI. Nataliia’s work has been published in New Media & Society, AI & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Memory, Mind & Media, Journal of Visual Literacy, and Discourse & Communication.

"This is the book I have been waiting for. In just 150 pages it lays all the issues on the table, from the inner workings of AI image generation to the complexities of interacting with it and the images that result. Up to date, authoritative and multi-disciplinary, it highlights the potential as well as the risks of this new technology. An eye-opening must-read for anyone interested in visual communication." – Theo van Leeuwen, Honorary Professor at UNSW Sydney, author (with Gunther Kress) of Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design "AI-generated images have transformed visual culture faster than any medium before them — yet critical frameworks lag far behind. This volume proposes six interdisciplinary lenses — spanning sociomateriality, distributed agency, interface affordances, prompting as cultural practice, emerging visual genres, and the politics of style. Together, they achieve something rare: a coherent critical framework for a phenomenon most scholars are still struggling to understand. This is the book we have been waiting for!" – Lev Manovich, author of AI Aesthetics and The Language of New Media, Presidential Professor, The Graduate Center, CUNY"This timely volume is an essential and genuinely exciting contribution to visual communication and critical AI studies. Rather than treating AI-generated images as technical novelties, it powerfully reframes them as cultural and political sites of struggle. A richly researched edited collection, the book equips readers with a conceptually rigorous toolkit to interrogate the practices, affordances and aesthetics that shape and are shaped by visual generative AI. Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images does not merely analyse synthetic images; it sharpens our imagination for understanding both the present and the future of visual culture." –Giorgia Aiello, Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan"As Bouko and Laba clearly state, visuals generated by AI challenge “our very notion of what an image is or might be.” In this powerful and multidisciplinary exploration, they take us beyond the surface outputs of GenAI to reveal the power, biases and histories upon which GenAI is built; the predictive nature of training data; and the curious liminal world of the resulting images. With new theorisations, such as vector agency, and new methods, such as multimodal walkthroughs, this book reveals the significance of the sociocultural, the political, and – above all – the human, in, of and with this brave new world." –Louise Ravelli, Professor of Communication, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney

• Introduction: Making Sense of AI-Generated Images by Nataliia Laba and Catherine Bouko Chapter 1. On Pataphysical Engagements with GenAI Image Making and Sociomaterial Trade-offs by Suneel JethaniChapter 2. On Vector Agency by Emanuele ArielliChapter 3. On Exploring the Visual Grounds and Affordances of AI-generated Images through Multimodal Walkthroughs by Daniel Pfurtscheller & Katharina ChristChapter 4. On Prompting as a Cultural Practice in Visual Generative AI by Craig Johnson & Rowan TullochChapter 5. On Representations and Emerging Genres of AI-Generated Images by Katharina LobingerChapter 6. On Machines, Users, and the Politics of Visual Style in AI-Generated Images by T.J. Thomson, Catherine Bouko, Nataliia Laba, & Janina Wildfeuer