My German is pretty dodgy, so when I first saw Heimatstrom on Bluesky, shared by Roland Meyer, a professor of visual culture at Universität Zürich’s Digital Society Initiative, I misinterpreted it and thought it was a far-right campaign. But no, Heimatstrom is a group of left-wing environmentalists using fascist AI aesthetics to make posters promoting solar power. They’re sharing the images in social media and also posting them at train stations, as shown in the image above. (Heimatstrom which means homeland electricity; Heimat has Nazi associations.)

Now they’re also getting some media attention (paywalled in Frankfurter Allgemein, and another in Volksverpeter) and that’s how I discovered them: Roland Meyer posted this link to a news story on Bluesky:

At first I didn’t get the joke, which may be because of my poor German – or perhaps I just assume that the far right might also be interested in clean energy. Here in Norway wanting to have a completely off-the-grid cabin with solar power and batteries is certainly not a desire that is specific to the left, and to be honest I’m not very informed about far-right energy policies outside of Trump’s bizarre love of oil and coal.

Critics point out both that it can be seen as duplicitous to use energy-intensive AI to generate images promoting clean energy, and that the images seem to assume that the far-right is against clean energy, which may not be true.

I’m interested in the rhetorical effect of the fascist visual aesthetics. It’s referencing fascism in two ways. First, it’s obviously AI-generated, which by now is strongly associated with Trump’s crazy images. If you haven’t already read Gareth Watkin’s AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism, you should do so. Second, it explicitly uses the visual style of – well, not all actually Nazi propaganda per se, but wartime propaganda.

Take a look at this image.

That’s not based on Nazi propaganda, it’s American: this is clearly based on J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster from 1943, which was made for Westinghouse Electric to inspire factory workers.

The busy background of the AI version is very AI, isn’t it, but the determined person with their fist is an obvious reproduction of the woman in Miller’s poster. Her replacement by a man could just be standard AI bias but I am so curious about the prompt here. Maybe generative AI just loves to insert American culture into anything, even pseudo-fascist German satire? For an LLM, the shared visual style and time period likely mean that the connection between the images is stronger than the divide between the Axis and the Allies.

In Norway we have had our own AI-generated image campaign recently for Dieselbrølet, “the diesel roar”, a campaign by truckers to reduce the price of diesel. There appears to be no irony in their use of AI-generated images. Or maybe there is and I’m just not getting it. Here is one of their images, posted to one of their Facebook groups:

This is much closer to the apocalyptic aesthetics of Trump’s recent images. The fire and exploding oil tanks are like an action movie, beautiful in their furious destruction. The truck at the top left is very much an American truck, Norwegian trucks don’t look like that. The black smoke pumping out of the truck is remarkable. Why is that there? The man in the yellow vest and black mask looks like he’s from ICE, threatening, with that pointing finger, threatening, confrontational. To me it feels like a declaration of war, a statement that if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

The environmental politics here is a bit confusing. The oil companies are greedy, but it’s the government the protest is against. The price of diesel increased due to the Iran war, and the Norwegian government actually removed taxes on petrol and diesel (probably in contravention of EU/EØS rules) several days before the protests were held. And one of the Facebook groups the images were posted to is called YES to environment, NO to road tolls – they don’t see themselves as anti-enviornmentalists.

Compare Dieselbrølet’s poster to this one from Heimatstrom. Heimatstrom’s is certainly less heartfelt. The image makes fun of that naked man holding up a charging cable to the sun. Who would this appeal to? I suppose it might make a left-wing viewer laugh, which in a way is as “us vs them” as the pointing finger and threats of chaos from Dieselbrølet.

How seriously should we take this, though? I picked images from a small subreddit that’s only a month old and where people are obviously trying out different approaches.

In that sense, Dieselbrølet’s transition to AI might be more worth paying attention to. They’ve been around for several years, so the shift in aesthetics is very clear. Here is a full-page ad in a local newspaper for one of their previous protests, held in 2019. The ad was reposted to their Facebook groups, and is typical of their aesthetics at the time: black, red, grey, and very clear instructions about what to do and where to go. This is very different from the poster above which also promotes a specific protest.

The aesthetics of the banners they put on their trucks is also not AI-generated, and more in line with the earlier posters – perhaps they used old banners. Here is an image posted on 29 April to the Facebook group Dieselbrølet that shows the banner on the front of a truck.