What Do We See When We See? Images, Power, and Perception in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Luís Alegre

This book reframes AI as part of a much longer history of technical vision. From Renaissance optics and the camera obscura to photography’s stabilization of automated seeing and today’s synthetic image generation, it traces how images organize knowledge, power, and attention. Generative systems shift the labor of the hand, the eye, and—crucially—the act of interpretation. Authorship moves from a single maker to a network of prompts, datasets, and social infrastructures. Rather than predicting machine supremacy, the book maps the present: a cultural moment where fantasies of “autonomous” AI mirror human anxieties about control, agency, and obsolescence.
Drawing on art history (from Vermeer to David Hockney’s account of “optical realism”), media theory, and contemporary practice, it offers clear concepts and vivid examples for readers who want to think beyond hype or panic and understand what images do—and what they make us do—in an AI-saturated world.