The language of photography from certification of presence to certification of plausibility
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4396/202601V01Keywords:
photography, AI-generated images, Barthes, Eco, certification of plausibilityAbstract
In the contemporary communicative ecosystem, photorealistic images produced by text-to-image tools increasingly circulate as “photographs” in journalism, political communication and social platforms, where they can function as persuasive evidence despite lacking any photographed referent. This article reconsiders Roland Barthes’s theoretical framework on photography in order to account for the semiological nature of photographic images generated by artificial intelligence. Building on recent empirical research showing that the recognition of synthetic content fails precisely where image elements are encyclopaedically familiar, I argue that the noema that-has-been gives way to the noema that-could-be in the regime of photorealistic images generated by AI; this means that the certification of presence is displaced by the certification of plausibility. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s interpretative semiotics, I describe the certification of plausibility as an effect of encyclopaedic compatibility and conjectural coherence, socially consolidated through platform circulation
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Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
