AI Literacy Lab at Aalto University

Why this Lab, now?

Never in human history has the use of photographic images been more widespread, whether in journalism, media, advertising, artistic practices, or disinformation. Every day, over 5 billion photographs are taken, yet an increasingly significant portion of these are no longer photographs in any traditional sense. They are the outputs of generative systems, trained on vast datasets, shaped by opaque platform infrastructures, and meticulously engineered for attention, plausibility, or persuasion. Far from neutral, these images are actively transforming how we see ourselves, relate to one another, and understand the world we share. As images are circulated and magnified by individuals, platforms, corporations, and nation-states, they weaken our discernment between reality and falsehood, authenticity and deception. How does one learn to read an image that is no longer a window to the world, but a window into a machine?

This is not only an epistemic problem; generative AI rests on deeply material infrastructures: planetary-scale systems of extraction, energy, logistics, and labour. Data centers are reliant on substantial terrestrial resources, exerting global consequences far beyond abstract digital realms; the ‘cloud’ is anything but immaterial. Generative AI systems shape landscapes and economies just as much as they shape perception. 

We at Aalto AI Lit Lab aim to equip publics, researchers, and policymakers with the tools to decode not just images, but the technological, political, and economic structures that shape them. 

Why Aalto? Why here?

The AI Literacy Lab, based at Aalto University, operates at the intersection of the Department of Art and Media and the Department of Computer Science - two internationally respected centers of excellence in interdisciplinary research, innovation in teaching and learning, and computational creativity. As researchers and practitioners working across photography, visual culture, journalism, artistic research, and creative practices, we at the AI Lit Lab are uniquely positioned to ask: What does it mean to be literate in a visual world increasingly saturated with synthetic imagery? And what tools, methods, and collective practices can help equip publics to critically navigate - and actively reshape - the aesthetic, political, and material realities produced by generative AI?