Speculative violence and the future archive: Generative AI, memory and the visual politics of tomorrow

This article examines the emergence of a new politics of vision shaped by the generative capacities of contemporary AI. It argues that generative technologies craft a distinct visual order, one that enables subtle yet devastating forms of harm through anticipation, projection, and the symbolic manipulation of the future by means of visual pre-enactment. I conceptualize this as speculative violence : a form of harm that does not depict bloodshed or explicit brutality but nonetheless embeds erasure and annihilation within the frictionless aesthetic of machine-generated futures. Speculative violence arises when generative AI is mobilized for its forward-oriented capacities in politically charged contexts, enabling images of possible futures to act upon the present; while not limited to war zones, this article focuses on the Israel–Palestine context for reasons of scope. It shows how, by giving visual form to what has not yet occurred, AI contributes to normalize the disappearance of populations and the destruction of places, stripping politically inflammatory ideas of their shock by rendering them aesthetically plausible. A striking instance is the “Riviera of the Middle East” video, circulated by Donald Trump in February 2025, whose synthetic fantasy of Gaza as a luxury resort visually anticipated – and helped normalize – the logic later formalized in policy proposals, such as the G.R.E.A.T. initiative and the 20-Point Peace Plan. More broadly, the article argues that generative AI functions as archival technology. Far from merely recalling past data, it generates speculative futures that accrue into a future archive: a corpus of synthetic images that shape political discourse and collective perception by visually scripting what should be imagined as likely, desirable or inevitable. In examining this archive, the article illuminates how generative AI transforms political imagination into an aestheticized form of world-making, with profound implications for contemporary regimes of power and violence.