Reading Images in the Age of AI

With the ubiquity of AI-generated images, we are currently confronted with perturbing challenges to visual literacy, individual agency, and social contracts. Is authenticity still discernable? To what ends are images being generated and manipulated? How should law and public policy respond to “deepfakes”? Who can or should be held accountable for harm caused by them? Can individuals protect their own image? That of a group they identify with? How are gender identities and gender politics being transformed by the current possibilities for visual manipulation, instantaneous mass circulation, and the seeming immortality of digital falsehoods? Join us for a discussion on how to better understand and navigate a world where images may or may not tell the “truth,” and how to hold on to a sense of what is legitimate, legal, and human.

The transatlantic Humanities for Humans event series hosted by tenfourteen and the Walter de Gruyter Foundation is hosting a live conversation with Greta Olson, Elisabeth Lechner and Irene Kacandes on reading images in the age of AI.

Keep scrolling to read more about the speakers!

Prof. Dr. Greta Olson is Professor of American and British Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Diversity, Media and the Law at the University of Giessen, Germany. Olson is Principal Investigator of a large interdisciplinary project on migration and human rights. Author or editor of numerous books and author of scores of articles, Olson has co-edited most recently Law and Critique/Recht und Kritik. Kontrovers. Neue Diskurse zur Gesellschaft (Verlag Karl Alber 2025). She has lectured and educated on subjects related to law and literature, analyzing among other things anti-immigration and misogynistic narratives and images. Together with Elisabeth Lechner, she has published “#Feminist – Naming Controversies and Celebrating Points of Connection and Joy in Current Feminisms” (2022).

Image Credit: private photo

Dr. Elisabeth Lechner is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research on “disgusting” female bodies, body positivity, and digital feminist activisms was published academically and as the German non-fiction book Riot Don’t Diet! Aufstand der widerspenstigen Körper (2021, 4th edition). Lecher’s media activities include conducting workshops on media literacy and body shaming, recently as an ÖAD Science Ambassador. Her Rage and Care Against the Machine is forthcoming this year with Bloomsbury Academic. Dr. Lechner is active on social media as @femsista.

Image Credit: Elisabeth Lechner

Lechner and Olson will be in conversation with Irene Kacandes, the Dartmouth Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and German Studies. Kacandes is author or editor of eleven volumes on subjects as far ranging as life writing theory, the Holocaust, mortality, and Eastern Europe. Her Daddy’s War (2009) inaugurated the genre “paramemoir.” In 2025, DeGruyter published Humanities for Humans: Clear Thinking on Challenging Topics, edited and introduced by Kacandes with essays by some of the speakers in the first two seasons of “Humanities for Humans.” Book series editor of “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter Brill, Kacandes has held the presidencies of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and of the German Studies Association.

Image credit: Katie Lenhart

By attending this event, you consent to potentially being included in any photographs taken at the event for exclusive use in De Gruyter Brill and 1014's media coverage of the event.

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