When the appearance of synthetic images generated through multimodal models or popular text2image models is even considered, it is in terms of style and or kitsch, or as a provocation towards photographic indexicality. Parallel to critiques of artificial imagination I want to place a critique of the appearance of the artificial. Consequently, in this talk I pay attention to the phenomenal appearance of AI generated digital image, to speak to the way in which the experience of their appearance can constitute the appearance. This entails a media phenomenology for aesthetics. The many considerations in media philosophy of the digital and discrete as closed off from human experience, or of digital media as occurring on a pre-phenomenal level, makes it only more pressing to look for the presence of the computational and/or digital in the appearance. Taking everyday and ubiquitous AI generated images as examples, I trouble the question of the aisthetic appearance of digital image synthesis - as determination or indetermination, as formatting or mediation.

Layers of abstraction and discretization, rigidly determined by rules and measure, are the conditions of possibility for the appearance of synthetic images. In what sense is the hard determination and application of rules visible in the appearance? This is an objective process of mediation and determination then, but perception and experience is never objective, and the experience of an image appearance is never fully determined. This is a process and tension of determination and indeterminacy, that covers both the generation and the phenomenal appearance of the image output - the analog indeterminacy of the image vs the discrete determination of the generative process that produces the image. The adjustable rules for different text2image models are determinations of measurements and constraints, they are formatting rules.

As synthesis in multimodal models is both discrete (computational) and unifying (generating a statistical average), an aisthetic experience and appearance of the synthesis of generated images would be both analog (unified) and digital (discrete). If determination formats the technical media output, indeterminacy formats the experience of the appearance. How can this be seen in the image?