Authenticity controversies: Witness media and generative AI imagery

This article explores how AI-generated content reconfigures struggles over authenticity in witness media. Media witnessing is traditionally understood as a relational field of practice involving the performance through media of testimony to oppression and violence, where the testimony must both be genuine and carry democratic weight. As AI-generated content circulates in and around global conflicts, concern deepens about misinformation, given AIGC’s perceived lack of an “indexical” relationship to reality. This article acknowledges but goes beyond the misinformation frame, instead focusing on two recent cases to show how multimodal AI may represent human experiences of conflict in nuanced and ambivalent ways, unsettling contemporary assumptions about media witnessing and the mechanisms through which it happens. We present a comparative analysis of two controversies around AI-generated content that foreground authenticity debates, informed by STS, witnessing and journalism studies research. These controversies demonstrate that, by subordinating indexicality to iconic or analogical representation, AI-generated content resists established witnessing norms, yielding questions about media functions, ethics, and power relations.