Max and norma opened a real-estate agency…

Blending theory and fiction, the authors—an artist and a philosopher—explore the aesthetic and political implications of generative AI. The current disjunction between the reality of the environmental crisis and the technological mirage embodied by AI raises uncanny questions about the status of the image itself and the multiplicity of discourse contemporary images may produce.

Through a series of speculative tales, this manifesto-book examines the many facets of an addictive fascination with generated images. A duo of real-estate agents manipulates reality through a metafilter. The city’s archives proliferate into an anarchive. The theft of light by the Platform plunges the images of art history into darkness. The inhabitants of an imaginary future are afflicted with pyropictomania—a strange pleasure taken in images of energy consumption, which transforms the planet’s last resources into a new form of wealth: available brain time.

Both joyful and purposeful, this book experiments with texts and images to generate momentum around a series of questions: what can AI do for us, and what does it do to us? What kinds of futures—and what kinds of alternatives—can be imagined with AI? Drawing on visual intensity and fictive imagination, the book unfolds as a sequence of speculative tales, at times ominous, at times hopeful, opening up new ways of thinking about artificial intelligence.