"Immagini in questione", the video of Professor Piotr Didyk's keynote lecture

Professor Didyk delivered a lecture on computer-generated images during the plenary session of the Cultural Project at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society.

The recent quality of images generated by artificial intelligence has surprised and worried many people. However, this is not a breakthrough since computer graphics have existed since the 1960s. Professor Piotr Didyk from the Faculty of Informatics at USI traced the history of computer graphics in his keynote speech for the plenary meeting of the cultural project of the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, which was held on 21 February.

The theme of the faculty's cultural project for the two-year period 2022-24 is "Immagini in questione". One of the topics investigated was our relationship with computer-generated "artificial images". In a dialogue with Professor Katharina Lobinger, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, Professor Didyk recounted the technological developments that have led to increasingly realistic images and films and pointed out that the basis of these technologies is the critical contribution of studies on how human beings perceive their surroundings. The challenge, Professor Didyk concluded, is not to recognise artificial images, but to determine when we should consider an image to be artificial, since even the digital photographs we take with a smartphone are processed.

After the keynote lecture, Professor Kevin B. Lee presented some of the video-essays made during the workshop for the academic body. The meeting ended with presentations from the coordinators of the four working groups that make up the faculty cultural project - "The Image Factory", "Inclusive/Excluding Images", "Images and Temporality", and "Truth in Images" - who outlined the results achieved so far and presented future activities.