Michael Mandiberg

Taking Stock

2025
Digital & Technological Art

I collected 130 million stock photographs to create Taking Stock, a series of photographs and videos that reveal the ghosts haunting these ubiquitous images. Stock image archives have been a key source for training generative AI models. I wanted to know what AI is learning about us from them. I used Machine Learning and AI tools to analyze these stock photographs textually and visually, clustering the images by theme, pose, and gesture. The videos exhibited Miami explore the most common objects in the images: phones, computers, money, credit cards, flags, and people eating salad.

Wisper logo over a glb of a crater with a grid texture
Wisper logo over a glb of a crater with a grid texture
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