Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl (born 1966 in Munich) is a German filmmaker, installation artist, and writer who has repeatedly topped ArtReview’s Power 100 ranking of the art world’s most influential figures. Her essays — most famously “In Defense of the Poor Image” — shaped how a generation of artists thinks about digital images, and since the mid-2010s her installations and texts have turned that lens on machine learning.

Mean images and machine slop

In “Mean Images” (New Left Review, 2023), Steyerl argued that AI-generated visuals are not pictures of anything real but statistical renderings — averages extracted from scraped data that trade photographic truth for probability, borrowing Ted Chiang’s description of ChatGPT as a “blurry JPEG” of the web. Her 2025 essay collection Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat extends the critique, connecting generative models to energy extraction, ghost labor, and “model collapse” — the degeneration that sets in when AI trains on its own outputs.

Steyerl is no distant observer: she experimented extensively with AI tools in her own studio from 2017 to 2024, and it was that familiarity, critics note, which hardened her verdict. In a 2025 Spike interview she dismissed the industry’s “magical” marketing as cover for products that degrade both images and their users, asking whether artists can turn AI against its own military-industrial logic.

Because she engages the tools rather than boycotting them, Steyerl occupies a distinctive position in the debate: her opposition is not to computation but to the corporate machinery of scraped data, hidden labor, and surveillance that current generative AI is built on.