AI photography and composite memory

If generative AI images are statistical averages of a dataset, then they are also digital documents of culture. In this formulation, images are not simply fake or real, but statistical samples, aggregates of cultural value made manifest in an image. In effect, generative algorithmic processes merge large amounts of different image data into new images that have no singular origin in chronological time or space. While this may seem like a disturbance of the traditional ontology of the photographic image, there is nevertheless a pre-history of such statistical practices in analogue photography: composite photographs. The composite image offers a dynamic model, composed of manifest image and latent source.