The right to illegibility and visibility politics in the age of AI

The article analyzes the regime of visibility in the era of artificial intelligence, where images cease to be mere representations and become operational tools used for classification and prediction. The author invokes Trevor Paglen's concept, advocating for the introduction of a "right to opacity" as a foundation of human dignity. In contrast to traditional privacy, which protects specific secrets, opacity is intended to protect against algorithmic inference and automated scoring. The text emphasizes the necessity of creating "safe havens"—spaces free from total data extraction and biometric surveillance. The goal is to restore balance in the citizen-state relationship, where transparency should apply to institutions of power rather than the individual, whose right to be invisible to machines becomes a new frontier of freedom.