Identity Formation and Techno-Skepticism in the Digital Vernacular
Debates about generative artificial intelligence often frame it as a threat to human creativity. This presentation argues instead that AI extends a longer history of hybrid vernacular expression in digital culture. Focusing on AI-generated and AI-suspect images of the Viking Age, it examines how online communities negotiate the epistemic status of visual media. These disputes center on legitimacy rather than accuracy: what counts as authentic, what counts as AI, and who has the authority to decide. Timothy Liam Waters identifies three claimant groups, each advancing distinct epistemologies. Generative AI emerges as an epistemic flashpoint that destabilizes existing criteria of authenticity and reshapes how vernacular authority is produced online.
This presentation is part of the Lunch with Digital Humanities lecture series, hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (DARIAH-IS/CDHA, https://www.mshl.is) in Spring 2026.
Learning Outcomes
After studying the resource, learners should be able to:
- examine how everyday digital vernacular and acts of AI identification serve as rhetorical strategies to negotiate authenticity and epistemic legitimacy in online communities;
- compare distinct claimant frameworks such as historical accuracy policing, identity-based heritage claims and hyper-masculinist evaluative frames used by digital groups to police representations of the past;
- apply audience-oriented digital ethnography and qualitative discursive tagging to analyze how users evaluate and respond to AI-generated cultural heritage imagery.
