Artificial intelligence and otherness

Representations of immigrants using generative image creation tools

Abstract

We cannot deny, for better or for worse, that the democratization and accessibility of artificial intelligence represent an epistemological, social and technical turning point in society. In this context, it is necessary to investigate how tools for creating generative images represent and narrate the identities of people from a migrant background. On the basis of a common list of commands (prompts), entered in different geographical areas and in different languages, the purpose of this article is to determine whether the different tools generate representations that corroborate the maintenance of certain paradigms, such as those associated with stereotypes, or whether, on the contrary, they propose a different way of seeing the world by breaking with certain “received ideas” about immigrants. For this purpose, we use three different image generation tools, DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The article presents two main aspects: the first, the establishment of a methodological research framework in relation to artificial intelligence tools; the second, the semiotic analysis of the results. The analysis of the images generated takes into account symbolic, political and expressive aspects, drawing on theoretical approaches from identity theories, sociosemiotics and discursive semiotics.