Amongst photographs of brutalized bodies and sheet-bound corpses, of rubble and smoke, we sometimes encounter images that shock in a different way. For instance, images of Palestinians in the West Bank sitting down to breakfast as rockets arc overhead. These everyday moments are rendered surreal by the backdrop of war: a juxtaposition between life-as-usual and the swirling shroud of death. Other images shock insofar as they seem to offer glimpses of humanism in the midst of catastrophe: a cigarette shared between prisoners of war (POWs), an embrace between reunited kin. I want to talk about an image that at first glance appears to belong to this latter genre.

It shows three children with dust-caked faces, smiling beatifically and clutching small Palestinian flags. Behind them, the rubble of their homes and their lives. Among many others, a Tunisian journalist posted the image, saying: “Despite the horrific bombing and the daily killing, a better day will come, & a safer, more peaceful, & more humane future will begin, God willing” (al-Hachimi al-Hamidi 2023). But something is off.

Something strikes a dissonant chord. Is it the caption? The sentiment? The fact that the image has a staged, quasi-cinematic quality? I suspected almost immediately that the image was Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated, although many people have reposted the “photo” to social media without noting this detail. I was unsettled by the image and the phenomenon it seems to index.

Since then, I have asked myself why I found this particular use of generative AI so disquieting, when more ghastly AI-derived images continue to emerge. Media discussion of the images and of the role of AI-generated images in the context of the ongoing situation in Gaza and the West Bank tends to focus on their informatic aspect—the fact that such “photographs” are misinformation, part of a larger web of “fakes.” Sure, there is an element of betrayal, if one retains a complacent faith in the evidentiality of photographic images, in what scholars have called their indexical dimension (drawing on the philosopher and semiotician C.S. Peirce). But had we not renounced this faith some time ago, well before the recent bloom of AI-generated images? Why the shock?

For me, the unsettling aspect of these images has little to do with their status as (mis)information. Rather, it’s the image’s palliative aspect that I find most disquieting; the captions read: “look, they can still smile!” I’m sympathetic to this desire for images of hope, for images that offer up some glimmer of optimism, for images that humanize rather than dehumanize their subjects. But what does it mean to artificially generate images of hope in a context of ongoing genocidal violence? I fear that it glosses over the grim reality of damaged life—the reality that those Palestinians (children and adults) who survive the latest eruption of this conflict will carry its social, physical, and psychic imprints.

My musings drew me to the concluding paragraphs of Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1969) to his reflections on the chiastic relation between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art in the context of mechanical reproducibility. While the image of smiling Palestinian children and other AI-generated images relating to the situations in Palestine and Israel are not framed as “art”—instead, they have tended to be approached as documentation (spurious or not)—,the questions Benjamin raises are salient to a context in which images (as much as speech) constitute the nervous system of political discourse, forming what Achille Mbembe describes as “circuits” that seamlessly link affect, emotions, passions, and convictions (2021).

But what exactly does Benjamin say? We are likely familiar with his thesis that the mechanical reproducibility of visual artworks results in a withering away of aura and its associated cultic value. In the essay’s abstruse conclusion, however, Benjamin attempts to recoup some socialist value from the massification of art (specifically, film). Namely, he suggests that politicized artworks can mobilize the masses, who do not simply contemplate an enshrined artwork, but who instead absorb filmic images in a state of distraction. This latter observation rings true, but its revolutionary aspirations sound increasingly hollow.

My thoughts spin back to Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, who sought to make viewers “open their eyes” to the violence of the Vietnam war by burning his own arm with a cigarette butt and remarking, “A cigarette burns at 400 degrees, napalm burns at 3,000 degrees” (42). (And here, we could detour into discussion of violence as defining the limit of representation, but perhaps another time.) We might ask whether images like this one of smiling, AI-generated Palestinian children aim to open our eyes in this way, or whether something else is at stake. Regardless of intent, my sense is that these images can have the opposite effect. As many have noted, generative AI is trained on aggregates of existing images and can easily lead to the reinscription of generalized types (i.e., stereotypes). What emerges in this case is a generic image of smiling “Middle Eastern” children in the rubble of war. This use of generative AI does not disrupt the circuits of imagery, affect, passion, and political conviction (to recall Mbembe), but instead amplifies and accelerates them.

I would venture that such images do not and cannot “open our eyes,” in the sense that Didi-Huberman and Farocki entreat, because they are steeped in the balm of the familiar—they conform too closely to generic conventions of romanticized war reportage. (This is not to say that technologies of generative AI cannot produce images that disrupt conventions; it’s simply to note that they are premised on the re-generation of patterns.) Such images reproduce a conventionalized frame of war, in which an impermeable membrane separates the viewer from the subject to whom we extend sympathy from afar (across the screen). With the aid of such frames, we always already know where we stand.

Let’s consider this framing more closely. In the children’s shy smiles, the resilience of the human spirit is rendered emblematic (I mean this quite literally: the picture is captioned by a motto, which is elaborated in the accompanying inscription). It’s a vision of human resilience prevailing against the steepest of odds, a fragile flame of hope flickering in the embers of catastrophic destruction. Or at least that’s the sentiment professed in the social media posts and news reports that have recirculated and reframed the image, apparently unaware of its AI-provenance. Although the image seems designed to humanize its subjects, I can’t help but wonder about the parameters of such humanism, which demands reassuring smiles from victims of genocidal violence. Such images feel placating, almost palliative. This is not the “aggressive humanism” advocated by the Berlin-based Center for Political Beauty, nor is it Edward Said’s or Sylvia Wynter’s expansive, anti-exclusionary humanisms. Rather, this is vanilla humanism: palatable, inoffensive, discrete.

But war is not palatable, inoffensive, or discrete. To render it vanilla is not unlike writing “lyric poetry after Auschwitz.” Returning to Benjamin (1969), we might reflect on what images we are “absorbing,” and we might further ask what is lost when a “unique apprehension of distance” (characteristic of the auratic artwork) evaporates and we have a surfeit of images at our fingertips. We are certainly distracted and absorbed–speaking for myself, at least–but is this really the opposite and antidote to the aestheticization of politics? (This aestheticization, per Benjamin, necessarily culminates in war.) Between the Scylla of contemplation and the Charybdis of distraction, what narrow channel remains for images that “open our eyes” without firm moral footing? It’s not this one.

Author's note: The full post (since removed) said: “Don't despair. This is how I read the attached picture message. Despite the horrific bombing and the daily killing, a better day will come, & a safer, more peaceful, & more humane future will begin, God willing. Cry Freedom. Cry Palestine. #Gazabombing #IsraelAttack #Palestine - @malhachimi.”