Short abstract

This paper examines AI-generated bodies through documentation theory, arguing that synthetic data practices produce “documentary bodies.” It explores how generative systems reshape the politics of representation and knowledge about bodies.

Long abstract

Contemporary digital infrastructures increasingly translate human bodies into data, profiles, and computational representations circulating across platforms and datasets. While these processes are often approached as technical operations, they can also be understood as documentary practices through which bodies are inscribed, stabilised, and made available for knowledge production.

Drawing on document theory, this paper argues that bodies function as documents within socio-technical systems. Through processes of inscription, classification, and circulation, embodied persons are transformed into documentary objects that can be stored, mobilised, and interpreted across institutional and technical contexts.

Approaching data infrastructures as sites where representations are actively produced foregrounds the practical work through which certain traces of embodiment come to stand in for persons and populations. Developments in generative AI and synthetic data intensify these documentary dynamics. Generative models increasingly produce artificial likenesses, simulated biometric patterns, and synthetic datasets intended to represent human populations. Rather than reproducing existing individuals, these systems assemble documentary bodies: constructed representations standing in for embodied persons within data infrastructures.

Framing synthetic data practices as documentary processes foregrounds the politics of representation embedded in AI systems. Which traces of embodiment become legitimate data? How are bodies abstracted, recomposed, and circulated as authoritative representations? And how do synthetic bodies participate in the production of knowledge about populations and persons? By situating AI-generated representations within longer histories of documentation, inscription, and classification, this paper contributes to STS debates on the ontological politics of synthetic data and the changing conditions under which bodies become knowable through computational systems.