Latent Spaces: AI, Art, and the Archive* | October | MIT Press (opens in new tab)

This essay by Antonio Somaini develops a critical theory of “latent spaces” — the compressed, vectorized mathematical substrates at the heart of contemporary AI models — and their impact on the ways in which the past is processed and interpreted. Opening with the Trump administration's AI-assisted purge of words and images from federal documents, alongside PragerU's production of deepfake videos for the White House's Founders Museum, Somaini argues that AI technologies are introducing a new r...