This study proposes an anthroposemiotic theory of prehistoric writing, moving beyond the traditional view that script emerged purely from administrative needs in early Mesopotamian civilizations. Instead, it intends to demonstrate that writing’s deepest roots may lie within the graphic and ritual practices of the Upper Palaeolithic. Approaching early humanity as Homo symbolicus, this study explores how cave art, geometric signs, and monumental architecture may have functioned as exosomatic memory and sacred mediation. Drawing on archi-écriture and spatial syntax, the research shows that prehistoric marks organized spatial relations and structured symbolic ecosystems long before their formalization into phonetic scripts. Ultimately, writing’s genesis can be situated within a broader cognitive evolution, where symbolic exteriorization transformed natural surfaces into durable spaces of meaning.

Generative AI confronts semiotics with a new kind of sign-producing machine that actively reshapes the production and interpretation of visual content. Addressing the lack of humanities-based transdisciplinary research on this transformation, this study aims to establish a methodological foundation for the semiotic analysis of multimodal AI. By combining visual, social, quantitative, and multimodal semiotics, the paper proposes an integrated micro–meso–macro framework for evaluating AI-generated images. The analysis moves from the micro-level examination of plastic features and text-to-image translation, through the meso-level of enunciation, narrativity, and causality, to the macro-level of social stereotypes, ideology, creativity, rhetoric, truth, and inference. This is supported by a case study on lonely death and a semiotic explanation of latent space.