The advent of generative AI and its use for image and video creation has contributed to a crisis of the concept of truth of epochal proportions. When every photo or video we see online could have been generated by a machine and depict a reality that does not exist, the 150 year long anomaly of photography as a testimony of reality shatters under our very eyes.

Conceptual artist Phillip Toledano has been exploring this uncanny valley for a while. In “We Are At War” he used Midjourney to imagine Robert Capa’s lost D-Day photos. For “Another America” he partnered with the New Yorker writer John Kenney to create a collection of photographs and short vignettes from a midcentury American past that never took place.

With his new book “Another England”, published by L’Artiere, Toledano replicates the experiment with his own home country, reliving through AI a series of historical facts that seem real and feel like they could have happened, but in reality are completely made up with the help of AI.

Phillip Toledano

“The very existence of AI has made everything true, and nothing true, simultaneously. Not only have facts and history become infinitely elastic, but they are now also personal choices, informed by whatever internet silo or reddit group we happen to inhabit”, says Toledano. “‘Another England’ is the second instalment in my historical surrealism series. It is both based in truth, of what might have happened and what could happen, and based in fantasy. In some ways, it mirrors our new relationship with media and the image”.

According to Toledano, AI is the perfect instrument to explore the very nature of the times we are living in, and the seismic shift AI has caused by demolishing the very concept of a shared objective reality. As history is being rewritten in front of our eyes, as politicians invent and redefine truth often with no help from AI at all, Toledano’s work is a strong case for showing where we are headed, and it does that by looking at a past, even if it is one that never existed.