Marina Chao, currently curator at the Center of Photography at Woodstock (CPW) and previously Curator at the International Center of Photography, has organized a day-long convening entitled Seeing Meaning: From Pictographs to AI. This public symposium brings together artists, writers, designers, scholars, and researchers to explore the intersections between image and language across disciplines. In light of emergent text-to-image AI tools and the training of machines to process image and language as a single unit, the conflation, simultaneity, and slippages between picture and text—as old as language itself—are particularly visible today. Looking at these relationships from a multitude of perspectives, the speakers raise urgent questions about the ethics of photojournalism in the absence of a photographer-witness and how to navigate the proliferation of misinformation in the media. In their work they weave cognition, vision, and text together in generative ways—touching on sound, speech, citation, transduction, accessibility, spirituality, empathy, and connection—that sheds light on intrinsic but elusive connections between the brain, image, and language. Looking towards the future, they imagine a more compassionate technology guided by ancient knowledge.