Seeing Human Rights in an Age of AI

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This lecture positions AI-based images as an evolution and exacerbation of long-standing and wide-ranging challenges with visual manipulation and persuasion. It traces how notions about visual evidence developed in tandem with techniques of manipulation, artifice, and illusion. From an 1869 case of a “spirit photographer” that put the evidentiary status of photography on trial to contemporary wrongful arrests due to AI facial recognition tools, the lecture scrutinizes how technological manipulation of evidentiary images has impacted the pursuit of justice and human rights. It argues that upholding human rights in an age of AI does not merely involve improving standards of authenticity and proof. It requires examining the longstanding hierarchies of human life and the social inequalities they have helped create in the U.S. and around the world.

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