Into the Universe of Predictive Scientific Images. AlphaFold 2 and the Extension of a Genre

In 2024, for the first time, two Nobel Prizes – in Chemistry and Physics – were awarded for technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of AlphaFold 2, a system capable of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, solving a problem that challenged scientists for decades. While AI-generated scientific images are not new, the case of AlphaFold 2 exemplifies the introduction of some changes in the generation process of these visualization devices that leads to rethink the genre of scientific images. Through semiotic analysis and Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of technical images, this contribution will try to conduct an analysis of the reshaping processes affecting this genre and to reflect on how to configure this new type of imagery from an epistemological point of view.