10. Hypothetical Images*

Photographs and illustrations made by artificial intelligence (AI) systems can create digital files that resemble images. These images mark an enormous turn in the history of photography and creative expression. In this chapter, I argue that anchoring the name of these digital artefacts in their statistical origins can create a more critical frame for evaluating their meaning. Each of these images is drawn from a statistical analysis of a dataset, and the images therefore represent a plausible example, inferred from that data, of an image that might exist in a spectrum of noise within the model. Because these images are, in essence, a proposal of an image, I suggest they be called hypothetical images: still images, but images made to suggest the existence of something that has not yet been created.