“A.I. IS HOLDING A MIRROR TO OUR SOCIETY”: LENSA AND THE DISCOURSE OF VISUAL GENERATIVE AI

Resumen

This paper analyzes the global English-language press coverage of generative AI app Lensa and finds that it echoes existing technological discourses, focusing on the app’s predatory data practices, the biased content it produced, and the user behaviors associated with it. I argue that this coverage provides evidence of discursive closure (Deetz, 1992; Leonardi & Jackson, 2003; Markham, 2021) around both the risks and the potential of visual generative AI in a manner that supports the maintenance of the status quo. I also suggest that the press coverage of Lensa, which both articulates key AI-related harms and frames those harms as intractable and insolvable, creates a discourse of inevitability (Leonardi & Jackson, 2003; Markham, 2021) that has implications for how these issues are understood by the public, and for the approaches that are taken to address them.