Images and AI: out of the loop

Introduction Images are how we perceive the world. They are important. In this post I will talk about the concept of operational images, how the use of these images has risen and shifted, and why that is important in light of recent events such as the Anthropic/Department of War dispute, the war in Ukraine, or the rise of slop on social media. I hypothesize that these images allow systems to optimize for a single metric. By creating an optimization loop in a system, humans are far from excluded from it and are in fact often part of the metric as the systems improve. However, they lose legibility and understanding of a system that acts on their reality. Historical context As early as WWII, cameras were attached to bombs. At that time the images could not be recorded as they were filmed, the footage we have is someone filming a TV screen. Cameras attached to weapons however gained much more widespread use and diffusion to the public during the Gulf War in 1991 The military used cameras to monitor and control bombing attacks from a safe distance. Cameras were also used to monitor assembly lines away from the noise and heat. If these images contained beauty, it was not intentional. Harun Farocki defines operational images as images that serve a functional rather than esthetic purpose. I would explicitly add[1] they do not describe the world but act on it by being used in a loop with machines or humans to optimize for a particular metric. The classic example of operational images are videos of an aerial view with a crosshair in its center. There is a building that is highlighted. Then a flash, then the building is gone. It is important to note that although they can be used as such later, these images are not propaganda: they serve to accomplish a military goal. It may seem silly to give a definition to images that fit this definition today, as they are very common and therefore don't feel special. The rest of this post will try to explain why the distinction matters, starting with the fact that despite operational images being common they are very recent, especially at the scale they exist today. Although operational images may have existed before (I think some kinds of maps fit their definition), they became much more common and seen by many more people during the Gulf War period, as cameras allowed for the first time the creation of many of these images, much faster (or even in real time). Maps didn't have to be drawn by hand, they could be autonomously created. Humans didn't have to plot paths in the map, an algorithm did. Humans didn't even have to travel that path, a missile did. The idea of "operational image" seems relevant to present events. These historical events seem relevant to events happening recently: AI art slop: The speed at which we can produce images has only risen since 1991, and this led to new operational images. Some accounts on social media create shocking viral content with AI. They seem to have no other motive than make something viral, their images addictive but meaningless to humans. Since they are optimizing for a single quantifiable metric with these images, they are some kind of operational images. However there is some kind of new element to it: Unlike war which has metrics decided by humans, the metric these images optimize for is the satisfaction of an algorithm which itself was not directly designed by humans: engagement and watch time emerged as metrics pushed by capitalism, then the mapping from content to predicted engagement score was learnt by an opaque system ("the algorithm") rather than designed by hand. We are seeing images made by machines for machines. Humans are out of the loop. I am reminded of Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. "At the same time, capitalism still depends on meaning systems to maintain a degree of order. Accordingly, Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 34) claim that ‘capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial’ meanings and beliefs in order ‘to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities’. Producing functional subjectivities requires resuscitating all kinds of archaic and antiquated ideologies: states and their ideals of citizenship, nationalist ideologies, family values, religious beliefs and folkloric traditionalism.2 Given its denaturalizing and (re)combinatory aims, the ideological landscape of capitalism can be seen as ‘a motley painting of all that has been believed’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983); capitalism aims to freely combine existing signs and traditions to produce the affective and aesthetic contexts it deems necessary for its perpetuation. Arguably, the operational, decontextualizing logic of capitalism finds its most faithful aesthetic mirror in AI slop, which likewise describes a process of aesthetic appropriation and computationally optimized reassembly and circulation." - Jernej Markelj and Jakko Kemper, Doing the numbers: the opera