‘Tribal Truths’. Public Debate in the Wake of Authoritarian AI Imaging.

In today’s public sphere already permeated by disinformation, an urgent topic of study is how the rapid proliferation of generative AI imaging technologies is affecting public deliberation. The now widespread accessibility of tools capable of producing fictional yet photorealistic images with minimal efforts is intensifying the circulation of misleading or fabricated digital content. Especially far right political parties, including in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Argentina, New Zealand, and the USA have been early adopters of the technology, suggesting that at this moment, politically, generative AI imaging is dominantly captured by the far right. The early adoption of AI imaging by authoritarian-minded parties has raised concerns about misinformation, sensationalism, instigation, lack of transparency, and political abuse of technology. While acknowledging the importance of the above concerns, this study seeks to reflect on the phenomenon in a wider sense: namely how to understand the nature of this new mode of political communication and its impacts on public deliberation. We will explore how exactly the authoritarian-minded use of AI imaging is reshaping the public debate, and specifically what the role of visuality and visualization is in this. Empirically, we draw on diverse examples of authoritarian AI imagery across the globe. Theoretically, we integrate insights from debates on illiberal democracy, deliberative democracy, digitalization and post-truth. More specifically, we bring together two distinct yet related theoretical perspectives: Hans Boutellier’s notion of neotribalism and Byung-Chul Han’s theory of infocracy. Although these concepts have emerged from different disciplinary backgrounds, both highlight the central connection between the rise of new digital communication technologies and the gradual replacement of rational, shared public truth by affect-driven ‘tribal truths’. By combining Boutellier’s and Han’s thinking, we come to a richer understanding of how the mass adoption of generative AI imaging is significantly accelerating the slide from public truth into tribal truths. To substantiate our line of thought, we analyze both the communicative properties of generative AI imaging (infocracy) and the social dynamics of the tribe-like user communities that develop around these tools (neotribalization). We conclude by outlining the challenging times that lie ahead for proponents of democratic deliberation.