Before diving into the specificity of AI, I want to briefly trace back on the lineage of image-making techniques and how different media have tried to define what makes them distinct. In 20th-century Western modernism, this question was formalized by Clement Greenberg, who argued that each medium should focus on its essential qualities. As he put it:
Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain.1
This shaped how some strands of Western painting developed, especially in modernist contexts where artists explore the idea of flatness, surface, and the boundary of representation. Sol LeWitt took this idea further from a conceptual perspective by stating:
"Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line." 2LeWitt's statement suggests a shift of attention. Instead of what the medium can represent, it is also worth noting what it materially consists of and how it operates. This self-reflexivity defined much of what can be called medium specificity. I interpret this idea as the nature of the particular system we engage in and its inherent attributes that are distinct in compression with other mediums.
Photography, however, was understood differently. Its distinctiveness was attributed to indexicality, the concept that a photograph holds a direct trace of its subject. Roland Barthes called a photo a "certificate of presence." 3 The mechanical process of chemically capturing bouncing light photons gave photographs their evidentiary status, which had a direct, physical link to what they showed. However, digital images rendered this concept unstable, as it could easily be manipulated and reproduced through computational processes, creating a kind of ontological uncertainty.4 With no material recording of presence at all, digital image holds only illusions of trace.5 Mary Ann Doane points out that this shift does not necessarily erase medium specificity but pushes us to reconsider what makes a medium-specific when the material substrate is no longer central. We could no longer assume the indexical trace just by looking at an image.
If we then look at an AI image, what differentiate AI image with other mediums? Is there still an indexical trace we could follow alone?