2025/10/23 by Amanda Wasielewski, Wasielewski, Amanda
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Neuroscience · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Cybernetics and Technology in Society #Digital Media and Philosophy #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.20350
openalex publication_date 2025/10/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
W.J.T. Mitchell's influential essay 'What do pictures want?' shifts the theoretical focus away from the interpretative act of understanding pictures and from the motivations of the humans who create them to the possibility that the picture itself is an entity with agency and wants. In this article, I reframe Mitchell's question in light of contemporary AI image generation tools to ask: what do AI-generated images want? Drawing from art historical discourse on the nature of abstraction, I argue that AI-generated images want specificity and concreteness because they are fundamentally abstract. Multimodal text-to-image models, which are the primary subject of this article, are based on the premise that text and image are interchangeable or exchangeable tokens and that there is a commensurability between them, at least as represented mathematically in data. The user pipeline that sees textual input become visual output, however, obscures this representational regress and makes it seem like one form transforms into the other -- as if by magic.