We are living in the digital transformation of all areas of our lives—including the images we perceive. Innovation in technology has always had an impact on art. Consequently, art history is increasingly using digital methods to observe and analyse these developments. Big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence challenge the notion of the artist, creativity, and the way we think about art. With many examples, this talk introduces the latest image generation technologies, their consequences for artists and for our collective visual memory.

Transformer models like Dall-e 2 are machine-learning models to generate digital images from natural language descriptions based on millions of images from the web. These new visual phenomena have recently been extensively discussed on social media, raising questions about the nature of such images and the role of artificial intelligence in art. How can we grasp this new phenomenon in a historical context? What does this mean for our human perception? Moreover: What then is the future of art?

I am grateful to be invited for this talk by the Espacio Fundación Telefónica supported by the German Embassy.