Reality aesthetics : on U.S. editors, visual gen-AI, and the burden of gatekeeping journalism

Abstract

Electronic communications solutions have revolutionized journalism's economic, newsgathering, and distribution practices since the turn of the twenty-first century. But the advent of generative artificial intelligence models (gen-AI) has since revitalized decidedly unresolved ontological dilemmas in an interpretive community that has long held a monopoly on representations of the “real.” Visual genAI capabilities, in particular, have imposed myriad challenges to editors' management of audiovisual assets in news products and the information ecosystems they enter in the public domain. This exploratory mixed methods paper on U.S. editors' perspectives found that visual gen-AI's perceived influence as an artifact, tool, collaborator, and competitor interrupts the historical arc through which the field has traditionally shaped its priorities. This paper thus introduces the dimension of reality aesthetics to the gatekeeping theoretical framework to guide the evaluation of visual gen-AI as the technology continues to intersect with the field's evolving configurations.