PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Visual Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1629478
This article is part of the Research TopicTeaching and Assessing with AI: Teaching Ideas, Research, and ReflectionsView all 16 articles
REFLECTION AI: Teaching with AI: Facial Subjects and the Politics of the Face
Provisionally accepted
- University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
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This essay explores the pedagogical use of images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the politics of facial representation. Through a media archaeological and visual culture lens, the essay outlines a classroom assignment, Facial Subjects, in which students generate photographic portraits using generative AI to critically examine how identity categories such as race, gender and class are constructed, mediated and encoded by machine learning (ML) systems. By comparing AI-generated portraits to archival and real-word photographic portraits, students engage in visual critique while developing media literacy in the analysis of images. The essay argues that teaching with AI-generated images provides new resources for visual pedagogy and that comparing those images with archival and realworld portraits equips students with conceptual tools for thinking about questions of aesthetics, normativity, and bias central to film and media studies today. Through this exercise, teaching with AI becomes a method of inquiring into the ideological underpinnings of contemporary image systems while fostering experimental and critical approaches to media pedagogy.
Keywords: critical media pedagogy, AI-generated images, facial recognition, Media Archaeology, politics of AI
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Åkervall. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lisa Åkervall, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
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