DARC affiliated scholars Renée Ridgway and Nicolas Malevé recently published their dialogue paper, 'Synthetic Data and Reverse Image Search: Constructing New Surveillant Indexicalities' in Surveillance & Society.  Ridgway and Malevé argue that the advent of computer-generated "synthetic data" has created another twist in the techno-information revolution of generative "artificial intelligence." Synthetic data has become a buzzword but also a panacea  to surveillance capitalism, often promoted by tech companies to circumvent privacy legislation and to develop cheaper monitoring technologies.

Addresing also visual culture, their paper focuses on the use of synthetic data in the context of "fake" images and discriminatory technologies by discussing the relation between representation and indexicality via the medium of (digital) photography and then via reverse image search.

Read the article here.