Semiotics of Machinic Co-Enunciation

In this paper, we propose a semiotic study on generative artificial intelligences, considering the work of Midjourney and DALL·E, that are computational devices capable of producing original images on the basis of the training they have received on large databases of visual, verbal and multimodal documents. The aim is to frame their functioning from a semiotic point of view and to describe the operations that can be performed during image composition, through the options available on the two platforms. To achieve this objective, the paper will be developed into three main parts. In the first part, we will provide a general contextualisation of the relationship between semiotics and artificial intelligence, in the broad sense. Starting from Pierluigi Basso Fossali’s (2017) assumptions about a semiotic perspective understood as the study of the social organization of meaning, AIs reconfigure the thresholds between the four dimensions he defined (perception, enunciation, communication and transmission). By considering the transmission and perceptual dimension, we will define the phases of the database construction and AI model training as pertaining to an archival (distributed) perception. In the second part, we will deal with the dimension of enunciation. On the one hand, we will describe the functioning of the diffusion models guided by human prompts. On the other hand, we will show the limits and potential of these AIs, through a discussion of the operable commands and the results obtained, in light of the experiments we have carried out over the past months (August 2023-May 2024). In particular, we will test how generative AIs produce images on the basis of prompts containing the styles of specific artists, how they fuse different styles together, and how they work on visual stereotypes. In the third part of the paper, we will focus on the relationship between verbal description and visual generation in order to provide, in accordance with the perspective of the intersemiotic translation, a new research object and a new methodology.