This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refracted commentary on the preoccupations of Internet visual culture. While the effects of AI on visual culture may themselves be transformative or catastrophic, we are more interested here in how it has been trained to imagine shared human, technical and ecological futures. Through a series of textual prompts that marry elements of the Anthropocenic and Australian environmental vernacular, we examine how this emergent machinic gaze both looks out, through its compositions of futuristic landscapes, and looks back, towards an observing and observed human subject. In its varied assistive, surveillant and generative roles, computational vision not only mirrors human desire but articulates oblique demands of its own.

翻译：摘要：本章实验性地探讨了计算视觉如何解读与综合呈现人类世的表征。基于大规模图像与标注数据训练的文本-图像生成系统（如MidJourney和StableDiffusion），能够生成兼具平庸复制、异质想象及对互联网视觉文化焦点进行折射性评论的惊人构图。尽管人工智能对视觉文化的影响本身可能具有变革性或灾难性，我们更关注的是它如何被训练来想象共享的人类、技术与生态未来。通过一系列融合人类世与澳大利亚环境白话元素的文本提示词，我们考察这种新兴的机器凝视如何既以未来主义景观的构图为窗口向外凝视，又通过观察与被观察的人类主体回视。在其多样化的辅助性、监控性与生成性角色中，计算视觉不仅映射人类欲望，更自主表达出隐晦诉求。