  This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and
synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as
MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images
and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as
banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refracted commentary on the
preoccupations of Internet visual culture. While the effects of AI on visual
culture may themselves be transformative or catastrophic, we are more
interested here in how it has been trained to imagine shared human, technical
and ecological futures. Through a series of textual prompts that marry elements
of the Anthropocenic and Australian environmental vernacular, we examine how
this emergent machinic gaze both looks out, through its compositions of
futuristic landscapes, and looks back, towards an observing and observed human
subject. In its varied assistive, surveillant and generative roles,
computational vision not only mirrors human desire but articulates oblique
demands of its own.
