There is a growing, deeply problematic tendency to use #AISlop for political education. One recent example from Germany is landtagswahl.ai, which follows the motto: «Hey AI, who should I vote for?» What is typical here is that AI is not only addressed as a pseudo-person but also as a kind of impartial judge. A thread
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@bildoperationen Naja, auf ner gewissen Ebene passen die Bilder total super zur deutschen Politik. Auf den ersten Blick einigermaßen einleuchtend, aber wenn man länger als ne halbe Sekunde draufguckt, sieht man immer mehr handwerkliche Fehler, Dinge, die nicht passen und offensichtlichen Unsinn.
The project assembles AI images of cityscapes supposedly representing the political programs of various parties. With their otherworldly glow, cartoonish aesthetics, and obvious glitches, all of these images have the same generic AI slop look familiar from countless LinkedIn posts and PowerPoint presentations
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We get to see video game-like bird's-eye views of imaginary cities outside of space & time, almost random assemblages of easily legible visual symbols (such as nuclear power plants or solar panels), each representing a political position: generic images mostly lacking coherence and plausibility
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However, the problem with these images is not just their genericness. It is the deeply populist idea that politics can be reduced to its immediately visible effects: politics is not judged by how it affects people's concrete daily lives, but rather by its aesthetics—by what image it produces.
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It is thus no coincidence that right-wing parties have used exactly this kind of image before in a similar manner. If your politics is all about offering imaginary solutions to mostly phantasmatic problems, generative AI is the perfect tool for propaganda. Every slogan can become an image
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AI image generation not only lends such generic visualizations of imaginary future scenarios a statistical pseudo-objectivity and a deceptive aura of neutrality, but also renders the politics employed to realize such a future invisible – by showing only results, not decisions or processes
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