Images of AI – between fiction and function

In this blog post, Dominik Vrabič Dežman provides a summary of his recent research article, 'Promising the future, encoding the past: AI hype and public media imagery'. Dominik also draws attention to the algorithms which perpetuate the dominance of familiar and sensationalist visuals and calls for movements which reshape media systems to make better images of AI more visible in public discourse. The full paper is published in the AI and Ethics Journal's special edition on'The Ethical Implications of AI Hype, a collection edited by We and AI. AI promises innovation, yet its imagery remains trapped in the past. Deep-blue, sci-fi-inflected visuals have flooded public media, saturating our collective imagination with glowing, retro-futuristic interfaces and humanoid robots.