Posted by October 2023 – My paper with Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, “Text-to-Image Generators: Semiotics, Semantics, and Society,” was published in Habits of the Anthropocene: Scarcity and Abundance in a Post-Material Economy, the ACADIA 2023 Conference Proceedings.
Brief Introduction
Text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion are becoming increasingly popular. These generators, whose models are trained on large datasets of text-image pairs, often scraped from the web, take text prompts as input, and use them to generate images—text-to-image prompting. In this visual essay, we raise questions about the entanglement of semiotics, semantics, syntax, and society in these text-to-image generator tools. We are intrigued by how these technologies are “intrawoven” with social and cultural contexts. How are their constructions and presentations reconfigurations? How do or might they inform pedagogy, theory, methods, and our publics?
Cite this paper:
Noel, Vernelle A. A., and Hayri Dortdivanlioglu. 2023. “Text-to-Image Generators: Semiotics, Semantics, and Society.” In Habits of the Anthropocene: Scarcity and Abundance in a Post-Material Economy, 3:49–54. ACADIA 2023. Denver, Colorado, USA.