"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
