"Such narratives suggest that generic visuals have limited capacity to function as public images – that is, as visual media for social thought and civic spectatorship. Findings from our research contradict this." 3/
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"We found that while UK-based news audiences mobilized dominant narratives when talking about stock photos and simple data visualizations in general terms, this did not happen in specific engagements with particular generic visuals." 4/
"In these cases, participants moved beyond dominant narratives, as generic visuals activated emotions, experiences and participants’ different identities." 5/
"We argue that generic visuals in the news are resources with which people make sense of their everyday lives and that people’s everyday lives are resources with which they make sense of generic news visuals." 6/
"As such, generic visuals do, in fact, function as public images, connecting and engaging audiences in public life and foregrounding the role of the personal in engagements with the social issues portrayed in the news." 7/
This paper is timely in relation to debates about AI images. With the increasing uptake of synthetic visuals across factual and fictional media, it is important to know more about how audiences engage with generic visuals: not so much w/r/t their indexicality but through an (inter)personal lens. 8/
The Generic Visuals in the News project was first conceived in 2017, was funded by a UK AHRC grant from 2020 to 2023, and this part of our research took a long time from the data collection to the final revision stage. This project was prescient vis-a-vis the 'publicness' of visual generative AI. 9/
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