The Seduction of Virtuality: How Generative AI Rewrites Our Gaze

The Evolution of Visual Manipulation

From Niépce's first photograph (1826) to deepfakes, images have always been an act of manipulation: not windows onto reality, but onto virtuality (3). Today, artificial intelligence takes this process of automation and sophistication to a previously unthinkable level, transforming visual creation into an algorithmic recombination of data accessible to everyone (democratization).

But what happens when the image is no longer just a distorted reflection of the real, but a universe built on desires, paradoxes, and collective complicities?

AI-generated images do not invent from scratch: they assemble fragments of a global visual archive, drawing on statistical models to create worlds that seem familiar but are intrinsically alien. The writer Vilém Flusser defined every photograph as a "symbolic surface" (2), a staging, the result of a series of technical and artistic choices that influence the way reality is presented (an ante litteram prompting). AI takes this idea to extremes: what it generates is not a representation, but a recombination of digital traces. The result is a virtuality that does not imitate reality, but replaces it with a catalog of probable possibilities, where the real is disassembled and reassembled based on prompts, parameters, and desires, fed to our digital world and bent by our will to paradox.

The tendency to manipulate reality through images is not new: advertising photography, with its explicit intention to persuade and sell, promising perfect bodies and ideal lives, represents a clear example of this manipulative nature, always playing with seduction. AI-generated images inherit this logic, but with a crucial difference: they not only humiliate the flesh (3), but the entire concept of authenticity (seduction and humiliation).

Generative worlds—from digital influencers to surreal scenarios—are so persuasive that they make the distinction between true and false obsolete. Yet, this algorithmic perfection triggers a sense of inadequacy: if reality is imperfect, or simply not to our liking, why accept it? Virtuality becomes an escape and also a condemnation to an eternal comparison with the impossible, initiating a paradox of desire, which is fulfilled with sharing: the "passive consumer" of images, trained to desire the artificial, is today an active collaborator.

Social media teach us to prefer virtuality: filters, deepfakes, generative memes are no longer tools, but extensions of our gaze. AI accelerates this process, offering visual experiences so fluid that doubt becomes superfluous. The problem is not credulity, but complicity: we know that images are artificial, but we choose to suspend disbelief. It is an unspoken pact, where fiction becomes a shared rule between those who generate, those who consume, and those who share.

In particular, those who generate AI images oscillate between two poles: the will to amaze and the desire for control. On one hand, there is an almost playful desire for virtuality to explore impossible worlds; on the other, the temptation to shape the emotions of others. This (creative) cynicism is not always malevolent, but reflects a new aesthetic of participation: the creator is not a craftsman, does not create algorithms, but directs them like a director of algorithms, while the public becomes a co-author, reworking and sharing content in an infinite chain of meanings.

Sharing an AI image is not a passive act: it is a creative or re-creative gesture, which transforms the original work, inserting it into new cultural contexts and giving it new meanings. Each sharing feeds a "shared imaginary," a mosaic of multiplied realities where desires, fears, and collective narratives take shape, triggering a generative cultural resonance. This process, although reminiscent of the "collectiveintelligence" theorized by Pierre Lévy (4), if not adequately monitored and verified, can easily lead to a collective dystopia, where truth is manipulated to the advantage of the evocative power of the image, which, once released, lives its own life, transcending the intentions of the creator…