Visual AI politics/politics of visual AI: Digital Politics Summer School 2025

Our Digital Politics Summer School is celebrating its fifth anniversary! This year, the school is focusing on visual generative AI. Details of speakers, call for workshop participation, and programme are coming soon.

When AI image generators were first popularised in 2023, they were perceived as leading to a new crisis of deepfakes and misinformation, particularly dangerous in cases of reporting war and human suffering, because of the dire consequences of war-time misinformation. Many media scholars view AI as a significant threat, that can lead to a new scale of media manipulation, an erosion of sense of truth, and a crisis of visual evidence. Others suggest that visual generative AI leads to a new form of synthetic realism and a potentially powerful political storytelling. Between these polarising approaches, much remains unexplored when it comes to visual AI politics and the politics of visual AI: the biases in representation; the absence of visual digital and political literacy; the lack of social justice considerations in both the techno-hype around AI-enabled possibilities and the fears around AI-induced harms; and the need for complex and interdisciplinary thinking around the rapidly expanding use of AI-generated images in political landscapes.

This summer school brings together established scholars, early career researchers and PhD students, to learn about, discuss, and experiment with visual generative AI, combining insights from media and communication studies, politics, visual criminology, AI art, and computational science.