Exploring the Concept of Transduction to Interpret AI-Generated Images.

Abstract

With the aim of contributing to the epistemological turn in the field of digital art history and cultural heritage studies, in a recent paper I introduced the idea of a techno-concept, defined as a co-production between machine rationality and human thought/imagination. Within this framework of discussion, this paper argues that the computational operations and corresponding information transformation processes that take place in latent spaces, especially multimodal latent spaces, can be explained as a transductive process, so that AI-generated images can also be understood as transductive phenomena. In this way, the concept of transduction, widely used in various scientific and philosophical fields, becomes a potential theoretical category for interpreting AI-generated images. The argument is based primarily on two concepts of transduction: The concept of signal transduction as used in the fields of biomedicine and biochemistry, and the concept of transduction proposed by Gilbert Simondon as part of his theory of individuation and differentiation. The paper concludes with some of the interpretive implications of approaching generative images as transductive phenomena.