Since 2022, the arrival of Generative AI models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have radically transformed visual production. Today, anyone with a smartphone or computer can create striking images from text or voice prompts and even generate videos that appropriate the likeness and voices of public figures. This expanded image ecosystem, brimming with creativity and risk, makes it increasingly difficult to determine what is true, fair, or legal. Recent scholarship in Science and Technology Studies has shown how AI-driven media amplifies long-standing representational issues, while introducing new ones—from bias and misinformation to uncanny hallucinations. Simultaneously in sectors such as healthcare, researchers are considering how AI can augment human eyes in the largescale analysis of diagnostic images, raising the stakes for how we conceive of computer vision.

What does all this mean for human communication? How do we navigate what Grau and Veigl call “new worlds of the image?” And who bears the cost of each experiment? In this talk, I examine case studies and debates responding to these questions, showing how history, power, and identity are still shaping our digital futures. Drawing on recent research experiences, I argue that anxieties surrounding human-computer collaboration are not only inevitable but essential for developing reflexive ethics and cultural sensitivity in the Information Age.

About Temi Odumosu

Temi Odumosu teaches Critical Information Studies at the University of Washington Information School in Seattle, USA, where she is an Assistant Professor and affiliate member of the Center for Advances in Library, Museums, and Archives (CALMA). She holds an MPhil and PhD in Art History from the University of Cambridge in the UK. Dr. Odumosu’s multidisciplinary scholarship and curating interrogate the visual politics and legacies of colonialism, examining how cultural records—such as illustrations and photographs—transmit historical narratives across time and space, from private collections and museum displays to contemporary art and public media. Her current research is concerned with digital remembrance and archival media, where she proposes ethically reflexive frameworks through critical making that reimagine the future of public storytelling. Recent projects include: Annotating the New Union Club: A case study on critical praxis for digital art histories (2025), funded by Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and hosted by open access journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW); her essays on contemporary visual activism “Feeling in the Dark: Rediscovering Black Portraiture as Speculative Metadata” (2023), and “Shooting back/ Speaking forward: Decolonial strategies in the work of Sasha Huber” (2022); and the practical working document “Approaching colonial photographs with care” (2024) for the Digital Benin project.