Machines do not look

#done

Machines do not look

Sight vs data

It’s easy to forget that image generators and LLMs do not look, because we are so used to equating images with sight. Images are imaged – they are wholly contingent on the time of capture and manner of imaging that produced them, as well as the time and manner in which they are reproduced. Everything a machine “sees” or “knows” is data – data which we do not see when we look. No image generator has looked at something that hasn’t been imaged.

And one could object, asking, well, do we really look at anything other than the image on our retina? Then it gets messy! And that’s interesting for sure. [footnote to thinking eye maybe?] It’s just not super relevant here: we can draw a distinction between something that has been perceived or something that has been imaged. Looking is an active process, while imaging has fixed photonic information in some medium, and so it is inherently mediated in its use. Our vision is mediated, but that is the medium in which visual experience occurs. Imaging is, almost by definition, the representation of vision in any media other than that which humans use to visually perceive the world.