Before the After: Representing Climate Actions in the Age of AI

Abstract

This chapter reflects on landscape representation in the age of AI and climate change. We argue that popular AI image generators, through regurgitation of data, would perpetuate an outdated, static framing of nature through a proliferation of the picturesque. This static view, which promotes nature as a resource, is partly responsible for the climate crisis. We trace the word landscape to one of its origins in old German Landschaft – inhabitants working on a piece of land – to argue that we should not conceive of a landscape without also conceiving of the labour and technologies used to produce the landscape. The climate emergency is a crisis of technological imagination, for which we lack the capability to imagine the technologies and techniques that produce incremental actions that guide the environment to adapt and evolve. From this perspective, generative AI tools can become a landscape technology to help society imagine climate actions for alternative futures.