Ratta, D. D. (2026). Speculative violence and the future archive: Generative AI, memory and the visual politics of tomorrow. Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society, 2, e15.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/cfc.2026.10020

Open access: Yes

Notes: In this article, Ratta explores a new mechanism of violence brought forward by generative AI, what she calls “Speculative violence, defined as “violence that operates through conjecture and projection, through the symbolic manipulation of the future by means of visual anticipation” (p. 4). For Ratta, GenAI can make futures visible that harm the present. Indeed, for Ratta, “By extending the archival function into the domain of prediction and fabrication, generative AI does not merely record or recall the world, but it prefigures it” (p. 7). In this way, speculative violence operates at both a material level (by impacting living conditions through the power of representation) and at a symbolic level (closing the space of what is possible). More than being inherently violent, GenAI becomes a tool for political prefiguration, open to those with the disposition to take it over: “a mechanism for engineering visibility itself, framing collective affect, habituating public perception and normalizing potential harm through plausibility” (p. 14).