Call for Papers „Generative Images – Generative Imageries: Challenges of Visual Communication (Research) in the Age of AI“

Societal discourse about the benefits, risks, and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) is in full swing. To date much of the debate has focused on text-to-text generators such as Chat-GPT, Bing, or Bard (for a recent overview see Sachs-Hombach et al. 2023). Yet, rapid AI development is also fundamentally changing visual communication: With Stable Diffusion, Dall-E or Midjourney, powerful AI generators of images and image sequences have long been available whose output is impressive in terms of diversity, richness of detail and image complexity. AI-generated images have long been used in a variety of media, social, and political contexts – even for strategic persuasion and political propaganda – and without the generative origin being obvious to users or being disclosed.

Generative images – generative imageries (GI) – thus offer enormous potential to fundamentally change the production, use, reception and handling of images. At the same time, little light has been shed on what it actually means for our understanding of imagery when images are increasingly produced generatively. Does this mean the “end of truth” as the established German news magazine Der Spiegel headlined in July 2023 emphasizing the challenges of generative imagery?

Against this background, we would like to use the upcoming international conference of the Visual Communication section of the DGPuK (German Communication Association) in Bremen and online to explicitly focus on taking stock of, reflecting on, discussing, and further developing our scientific understanding of generative images. In the context of the conference Generative Images – Generative Imageries we would like to explore the emerging field of tension around generative imagery and examine AI-generated images from an object-centered perspective, a production-centered perspective, a reception- and usage-oriented perspective, and a methodological and research-ethical perspective.

Submission Details

The contributions to be submitted should be original research and must not have already been
published or presented in identical form; this must be explicitly stated on the cover sheet of the
submission. The conference language is English to allow inclusive discussion in a rapidly evolving and highly
international research area. Presentations in alternative languages are possible, but must be
prerecorded using English subtitles and slides. For the coordination of the conference, it should
be noted on the abstract submission if the presentation will be pre-recorded in another language.

Please send your proposals for presentations (duration of the presentation: 15 minutes), full
panels or creative sessions in the form of an „Extended Abstract“ (800 words) as a pdf document
via e-mail to the following recipients by July 15, 2024.

For the organizing institute:
Prof. Dr. habil. Stephanie Geise
ZeMKI (Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research), University of Bremen
E-mail: sgeise@uni-bremen.de

For the DGPuK (German Communication Association) Visual Communication Section:
Dr. Wolfgang Reissmann
FU Berlin
E-mail: wolfgang.reissmann@fu-berlin.de

For the ICA Visual Communication Studies Division:
Dr. Saumava Mitra
School of Communications | Dublin City University
E-mail: saumava.mitra@dcu.ie

You can find the complete Call for Papers here.