Description
Abstract: This paper examines prompting as a photographic and ethical gesture within contemporary image-making practices that engage artificial intelligence. Rather than treating AI as either a creative tool to be embraced or a threat to authenticity to be resisted, the paper approaches AI-mediated practice as a site where questions of authorship, agency, and trust must be negotiated relationally and contextually.Drawing on my practice as an artist-researcher working with photography, sound, and AI systems, the paper focuses on two recent works, Instinct Glyphs and Artificial Resonance. In these projects, prompts are used to generate idealised narratives of birth and to animate intimate photographic materials such as tears and breast milk. These outputs are not presented as expressions of machine creativity, but as echoes shaped by training data, cultural scripts, and algorithmic logics. Through processes of translation, from text to emoji, image to sound, stillness to motion, the works foreground how AI reproduces dominant ideals while flattening embodied, temporal, and sensory experience.
Positioning prompting as a dematerialised yet consequential gesture, the paper asks whether photographic authenticity can still be understood as an ontological guarantee tied to indexicality, or whether it must instead be approached as an ethical and relational transaction. Trust, it argues, does not reside within the AI system or the generated artefact, but emerges through disclosure, attentiveness to process, and the retention of material and experiential residues that resist automation.
By remaining with uncertainty rather than resolution, this paper contributes a practice-based perspective on how photography might encourage “trusting voices” in an age of AI, voices grounded not in technological authority, but in ethical situatedness, vulnerability, and care.
| Period | 17 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Chester Photo Festival Symposium - Trusting Voices and Artificial Intelligence |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Chester Show on map |