How to See Like a Machine

We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us. By the award-winning artist, filmmaker and thinker.

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies “say” about the world, he teaches us to ask what they “do” and where such images come from.

Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this appar­ently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.1. Introduction
2. Invisible Images: Your Pictures are looking at you
3. Excavating AI
4. Machine Realism
5. Neural Activations
6. Society of PSYOPS
7. Archives of the Future
8. Conclusion
9. Acknowledgements"To be literate today means to come to terms with how the twin technical transformations of our time, computer vision and generative AI, work, and how they work on us: how they have reformatted our perception and cognition, our labor and leisure, our representations and realities, and will continue to do so with ever greater intensity. There is no better guide than Trevor Paglen, our most exploratory of artists, who, for two decades, has cracked open each new version of this black box, exposing proprietary abuses, inventing critical terms, devising counter uses, and imagining alternative futures. How to See Like a Machine is the toolkit we need."
—Hal Foster, author of What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle

"In this indispensable compilation, Trevor Paglen traces the fate of photographic images in the age of cognitive warfare, AI slop and pictorial conditioning. Decades of propaganda, psyops and photoshop have successively rid images of reality. Generative AI automates this process to create statistical renderings in a state of superposition; neither true nor false, but optimized to mess with human minds. When seeing becomes acting, thinking and theory need to involve actual visual practice, too. Paglens invaluable hands-on method of inquiry documents a shift in focus from images of reality to the reality of images. Required reading."
—Hito Steyerl, author of Medium Hot

"Paglen is an extraordinary artist and thinker. In these succinct, entertaining essays he broadens our understanding of vision, and shows how image-making is leaving the human eye behind"
—Hari Kunzru, author of Blue Ruin

"How will people choose to interact with art in a world where AI can spit out any image desired? When digital platforms value hyperpersonalization over discovery and learn through user surveillance? AI is altering visual culture more insidiously than it even seems, far beyond slop and plagiarism, and we need to understand it."
—Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2026

"A profoundly uncompromising, ambitious, and imaginative read"
—Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI

"Paglen's work makes the invisible visible. In his new book he looks at images and shows how images look at us. What emerges is a new space for thinking between humans and media. This book is urgent."
—Hans Ulrich ObristTrevor Paglen is an artist whose work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Barbican Centre, London. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.