How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI
In How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen argues that photography’s basic terms have flipped: images are now made by machines, for machines, and the picture that once waited to be seen has started looking back.
Collecting essays written over roughly fifteen years, the book tracks the shift from human to machine vision: the training-image economy laid bare in Paglen’s Excavating AI research, and generative models now producing pictures indistinguishable from photographs. Chapters range from psyops and UFO photography to stage magic and public relations, arguing these seemingly alien systems are stranger, and more human, than they appear. Published by Verso in May 2026 as a 192-page hardback, it is Paglen’s sixth book.
Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) trained as a geographer at UC Berkeley and has spent two decades making the hidden infrastructures of surveillance and machine perception visible through photography, sculpture, and investigative research. A 2017 MacArthur Fellow, he showed for years with San Francisco’s Altman Siegel (closed 2025) and is now represented by Pace Gallery his work is held by SFMOMA, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which surveyed his career in the 2018 retrospective Sites Unseen.
