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How to See Like a Machine:Images After AI
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Ebook
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We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us. By the award-winning artist, filmmaker and thinker.
Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cameras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies “say” about the world, he teaches us to ask what they “do” and where such images come from.
Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this apparently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.
Reviews
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Paglen's ideas are smart and suggestive, with the added virtue of being expressed in prose so clear it makes the opacity of other theoretical writing feel like a psyop. This lucidity not only makes his work readable but also staves off the perception that discourse about UFOs and the CIA must be riddled with conspiratorial paranoia... even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts.
, Art in America -
Paglen moves through psyops, UFO imagery, adtech, and recommendation algorithms to argue that the shift underway isn’t just about fake images, but about images that require no human eye at all. For anyone trying to make sense of what’s happening in the current digital and A.I. age, this is an equally readable and rigorous guide.
, Cultured -
How will people choose to interact with art in a world where AI can spit out any image desired? When digital platforms value hyperpersonalization over discovery and learn through user surveillance? AI is altering visual culture more insidiously than it even seems, far beyond slop and plagiarism, and we need to understand it.
Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2026
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To be literate today means to come to terms with how the twin technical transformations of our time, computer vision and generative AI, work, and how they work on us: how they have reformatted our perception and cognition, our labor and leisure, our representations and realities, and will continue to do so with ever greater intensity. There is no better guide than Trevor Paglen, our most exploratory of artists, who, for two decades, has cracked open each new version of this black box, exposing proprietary abuses, inventing critical terms, devising counter uses, and imagining alternative futures. How to See Like a Machine is the toolkit we need.
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In this indispensable compilation, Trevor Paglen traces the fate of photographic images in the age of cognitive warfare, AI slop and pictorial conditioning. Decades of propaganda, psyops and photoshop have successively rid images of reality. Generative AI automates this process to create statistical renderings in a state of superposition; neither true nor false, but optimized to mess with human minds. When seeing becomes acting, thinking and theory need to involve actual visual practice, too. Paglens invaluable hands-on method of inquiry documents a shift in focus from images of reality to the reality of images. Required reading.
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Paglen is an extraordinary artist and thinker. In these succinct, entertaining essays he broadens our understanding of vision, and shows how image-making is leaving the human eye behind
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A profoundly uncompromising, ambitious, and imaginative read
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Paglen's work makes the invisible visible. In his new book he looks at images and shows how images look at us. What emerges is a new space for thinking between humans and media. This book is urgent.
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Paglen’s essays are impressively cogent, engaging, and relevant ... [due to] the importance of this book’s subject and the valuable arguments Paglen makes, [we] recommend this title for all art and politics collections.
Library Journal -
Paglen confronts, with clear prose and a level head, everything from UFOs to psyops, offering a revealing look behind the curtain that you can’t unsee.
Art in America, 7 Books We’re Looking Forward to in May -
Paglen is well-placed to bring news from the more obscure, unexpected sites and sources of present technological predicaments. For the past twenty years, his wide-ranging practice—which includes sculpture, installation, photography, and a prodigious amount of text and talk—has explored the hinterland between secret military technology and the more or less subtle distortions of everyday life that technology eventually wreaks.
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