Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights· 2026Q1
The AI gaze and imagined places: Co-creation and negotiation with the generative AI assemblage
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Generative AI image production for real locations reinforces stereotypes, lacks diversity, and shows glitches, but also enables users to remix and challenge these tropes via a co-produced 'AI gaze'.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Introduces the 'AI gaze' concept, describing technologically mediated place perception co-produced by users and AI.
- Analysis of 523 prompts from 36 participants showed AI images of real places reinforce stereotypes, lack diversity, and include visual glitches.
- The AI gaze involves a distributed agency where AI resists human alignment but enables user remixing and stereotype challenges.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is increasingly used to produce images of places, yet how users negotiate representations of real locations remains understudied. Building on the tourist gaze, we propose the AI gaze: a technologically mediated way of seeing place that is co-produced through negotiation between users and the socio-technical assemblage underlying GAI. Combining semantic image analysis, interviews, and 523 prompts from 36 participants in Poznań and Birmingham, we show that these images reinforce stereotypical tropes, lack diversity, and include visual glitches. We argue that the AI gaze is distinct because of how agency is distributed: the GAI-assemblage seemingly resists attempts to align images with human understandings of place, while also enabling users to remix and challenge stereotypes.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Visual Arts and Performing ArtsArts and Humanities