AI-Generated Visual Imaginaries: Migration, Activism and Social Resistance at the US-Mexico Border

This research, framed within posthuman vision theory, examines machinic imagination and artificial intelligence (AI) implications in producing symbolic imaginaries about migration at the Mexico-United States border, focusing on activism, resistance, and migrant confrontation of dominant visual discourses. The study conceptualizes AI generative image programs as techno-aesthetic apparatuses that shape moral, political, and ethical sensibilities. Using Claude.ai to generate key concepts, the methodology produces images through four generative programs (Midjourney, Dall-E 3, Leonardo.ai, Stable Diffusion), analyzing them through social and symbolic imaginaries frameworks, digital rhetoric, semiotics, and iconology to reveal aesthetic tendencies and ideological biases. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

AI-Generated Visual Imaginaries: Migration, Activism and Social Resistance at the US-Mexico Border Chapter in Scopus