Generative AI, agency and aesthetic disruption in photographic art

This article examines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a disruptive technology in photographic art. It does so by using diffractive analysis to discuss how photorealistic GenAI imaging may disrupt dominant understandings of photography as an artistic medium and anthropocentric understandings of human versus nonhuman agency in artistic practices. Serving as a prism for discussion is The Electrician (2022), a photorealistic portrait created by Boris Eldagsen using DALL·E 2. Like much visual art that builds on the idea of the photographic and highlights nonhuman agency, The Electrician further challenges the boundaries of photography. It does so by imitating a photographic aesthetic without being a photograph, thereby re-actualising questions of what constitutes photography as an artistic medium. The article argues that when photography’s boundaries are already porous, and the field of photographic art is characterised by fluidity and experimentation, further challenging these boundaries does not necessarily constitute disruption. Still, photorealistic GenAI imaging may be considered a force of aesthetic disruption, as its current existence in a photo-philosophical limbo makes thinking of and theorising the boundaries of photography and photographic art acutely relevant, no matter their existing porosity. The unprecedented visual resemblance between (some) photographs and (some) photorealistic GenAI images readily calls for problematisation of existing concepts related to photography. The Electrician’s forceful highlighting of nonhuman agency, both through its visual expression, its modes of production and the discourse surrounding it, may—in its sociohistorical context—be disruptive. The artwork forces attention towards the entanglement of human and nonhuman agency, making the latter difficult to deny.