How To See Like A Machine (images After Ai)

By (author) Paglen Trevor
Short description/annotation:
We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us. By the award-winning artist, filmmaker and thinker.
Description:
Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies "say" about the world, he teaches us to ask what they "do" and where such images come from.

Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this appar­ently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.
Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. Invisible Images: Your Pictures are looking at you
3. Excavating AI
4. Machine Realism
5. Neural Activations
6. Society of PSYOPS
7. Archives of the Future
8. Conclusion
9. Acknowledgements
Review quote:
Paglen''s ideas are smart and suggestive, with the added virtue of being expressed in prose so clear it makes the opacity of other theoretical writing feel like a psyop. This lucidity not only makes his work readable but also staves off the perception that discourse about UFOs and the CIA must be riddled with conspiratorial paranoia... even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts.
Review quote:
Paglen moves through psyops, UFO imagery, adtech, and recommendation algorithms to argue that the shift underway isn''t just about fake images, but about images that require no human eye at all. For anyone trying to make sense of what''s happening in the current digital and A.I. age, this is an equally readable and rigorous guide.
Review quote:
How will people choose to interact with art in a world where AI can spit out any image desired? When digital platforms value hyperpersonalization over discovery and learn through user surveillance? AI is altering visual culture more insidiously than it even seems, far beyond slop and plagiarism, and we need to understand it.
Review quote:
To be literate today means to come to terms with how the twin technical transformations of our time, computer vision and generative AI, work, and how they work on us: how they have reformatted our perception and cognition, our labor and leisure, our representations and realities, and will continue to do so with ever greater intensity. There is no better guide than Trevor Paglen, our most exploratory of artists, who, for two decades, has cracked open each new version of this black box, exposing proprietary abuses, inventing critical terms, devising counter uses, and imagining alternative futures. How to See Like a Machine is the toolkit we need.
Review quote:
Paglen, whose past work has focused on mass surveillance and data collection, is less interested in how we perceive images online than in how they shape us. Our reactions are measured and fed back into systems that can fine-tune what we see next, ultimately reshaping reality in the process. The real audience is the machines running the show. Learning to see like one of those machines, Paglen writes, is the only way to understand what''s actually going on.
Review quote:
In this indispensable compilation, Trevor Paglen traces the fate of photographic images in the age of cognitive warfare, AI slop and pictorial conditioning. Decades of propaganda, psyops and photoshop have successively rid images of reality. Generative AI automates this process to create statistical renderings