In this respect, we agree with Thomas Smits and Melvin Wevers that “multimodal models have the potential to cause a multimodal turn in DH research” (Smits & Wevers, 2023, p. 1268). However, despite the extensive capabilities associated with image understanding tasks offered by recent MLLMs, we know little about how non-human agents ‘view’ visual media (Arnold & Tilton, 2023, pp. 9–31) and whether the results of such ‘viewing’ can be used to understand images and videos with complex cultural, social and behavioural contexts and dynamics.