The Gaze of the Machine

AI does not gaze. It does not look. It processes inputs and generates outputs through statistical operations on patterns extracted from training data. But Berger's analysis of the gaze was never about the biological act of looking. It was about the structures of power embedded in visual production — the assumptions about who is doing the seeing, whose perspective counts as neutral, what is shown and what is concealed and in whose interest. These structures do not require a conscious subject to perpetuate them. They require only a system that reproduces the patterns of the culture that produced it. A large language model trained on the textual output of a particular culture reproduces that culture's patterns with extraordinary fidelity — including the patterns of the gaze.