From "Openness" to Image: AI, Generative Models, and the Logic of "Closure"
Introduction AI-generated images have rapidly become part of everyday visual culture. Portraits of people who never existed, landscapes that resemble photographs yet depict no place, and scenes that dissolve under scrutiny circulate widely, provoking fascination and unease. These images are often discussed in terms of imitation, realism, or deception. Do they copy the world? Do they distort it? Or do they mark a break with human meaning altogether? Another way of approaching these questions emerges from Hilary Lawson’s Closure: A Story of Everything . Rather than asking what AI images represent, Lawson’s framework encourages us to ask how images — and meaning more generally — come into being at all. From this perspective, generative AI does not challenge human understanding so much as it makes visible a process that has always been at work: the process of closure. Closure and the Open World Lawson’s point of departure is a diagnosis of contemporary confusion. In a world without...