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The Social Inequalities and Social Ordering Research Cluster's Annual Lecture hosts (Manchester Metropolitan University) on "When image generators go to war: visual AI and political imagination". The lecture will take place at 14.00-15.00 on the 17th of June 2026 (Wednesday) at Lecture Theatre 4, The Wave, the ±¬ÁÏTV and online.
 

When image generators go to war: visual AI and political imagination

Today, in geopolitical theatres across the globe, the media landscape of war and political violence is being radically reconfigured by generative AI. But while the practices of synthetic image production and circulation have evolved with unprecedented speed over the last three years, scholarship at the intersection of visual generative AI and politics is still limited and fragmented. At present, most approaches to political effects of AI-generated visuals, whether still or moving, are structured around a central binarism: generative AI is perceived as either a catalyst of misinformation or as an empowering new technology of synthetic realism and storytelling. In this talk, I look more closely at the two approaches, and propose an alternative conceptual framing, to explain how both synthetic realism and misinformation claims can be weaponised, transforming not only political perceptions and news reporting, but wartime political imagination more broadly.

Dr Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; and author of multiple books; including Digital Militarism: Israeli Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Rebecca L. Stein, Stanford UP 2014); Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt Out Button (with Esperanza Miyake, University of Westminster Press, 2022); and Digital Technologies, Smart Cities and the Environment: In the Ruins of Broken Promises (with Liu Xin, Bristol University Press. Kuntsman’s current work focuses on the right to ‘opt out’ of digital communication; environmental impacts of digital technologies and AI; and the use of visual generative AI in times of wars and political violence.