"Does it feel like the future to you, or has A.I. already taken on the staleness and scamminess of the now-worthless nonfungible token? Artists have been deploying A.I. technologies for a while, after all... Still, the explosive growth of text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E (the last is named after the corniest artist of the 20th century; that should have been a clue) provoked anxieties that A.I. was coming for culture."
"Without specific prompting, these A.I. images default to some common aesthetic characteristics: highly symmetrical composition, extreme depth of field, and sparkly and radiant edges that pop on a backlit smartphone screen. Figures have the waxed-fruit skin and deeply set eyes of video game characters; they also often have more than 10 fingers, though let's hold out for a software update. There is little I'd call human here, and any one of these A.I. pictures, on its own, is an aesthetic irrelevance. But collectively they do signal a..."
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