Some time ago, a photo of Rimbaud circulated on social media that was not “real.” It had been created using artificial intelligence. Some people shared it believing it to be “real,” while others mocked those who considered it authentic.
The image is extraordinary for its beauty and, as Keats said, “beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” We have long accepted the manipulation of photographic archives, but only now are we truly willing to admit that images produced by so-called artificial intelligence can speak to us, find a place among us, and become part of the transformative exercise of art and archives.
There should be no problem with this, no moral judgment, much less ethical judgment, in the reformulation of image galleries. Those of us who spend hours searching for images of writers on Google notice certain shortcomings. The case of Rimbaud, like that of Baudelaire or César Vallejo, is proverbial: they revolutionized poetic writing, but left us with only a handful of images to recognize them physically. Are we open to this “erasure of the real,” this “packaging” of emptiness?
Packaging, in the sense that anyone, using these tools, can produce images that are foreign to “reality,” alien to the archive: Borges holding hands with Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound drinking sake with Yukio Mishima, José Martí and Whitman in a Manhattan bar, Faulkner and Heidegger riding horses through the Black Forest, or Freud taking sauna baths with Jung.
It is nothing more than revisiting another possibility of fiction. We take it for granted that there will always be another intelligence to alert us to the joke.
