I have a problem with generative AI. Which is rather embarrassing for someone who spends half his life explaining how AI is going to change the world. But after yet another hotel poster featuring soulless fonts, digital-vomit-coloured gradients, and human figures with that peculiar fever-dream aesthetic of a lobotomized art director, I think it’s time someone said it: having access to a creative tool and actually having something to say are two ontologically different things.
Heidegger once wrote that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. An especially useful insight today, when we’ve turned the prompt into the modern equivalent of an artistic license. A designer using a generative model brings years of Bauhaus, typography, composition, visual culture, mistakes, obsessions, and judgment to that prompt. A marketing manager typing “luxury hotel poster, elegant, minimal, cinematic” brings, for the most part, a corporate credit card.
Autechre have been working with algorithmic systems for decades, yet nobody listens to Confield and thinks that opening Suno during their lunch break is all it takes to become Sean Booth. Just as owning a urinal makes you considerably more likely to have plumbing problems than to become Duchamp. Meaning emerges from the relationship between intention, culture, and context. That terribly analog thing we keep calling talent.
The real miracle of AI, then, is that it has democratized production without democratizing taste. The result is LinkedIn, brochures, and digital hotel lobbies flooded with industrial quantities of synthetic content that are instantly recognizable for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, some company proudly reports yet another efficiency gain achieved by removing from the Excel spreadsheet precisely the person who would have known enough to say that the whole thing looked like shit.
By all means, give everyone a piano. Philip Glass can sleep easy.
And perhaps, just perhaps, pay your designers.
Until next week. Best regards from Simone.
SIMONE PUORTO
