Digital Culture

Commentary on digital creation, tools, and how it impacts the world

Visual Elevator Music: What AI Might Be Doing to Human Creativity

There's a study you should know about. Researchers linked a text-to-image AI with an image-to-text AI and let them run in a loop. Image, caption, image, caption. Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts were, the outputs collapsed onto the same narrow themes every time. Atmospheric cityscapes. Grandiose buildings. Pastoral landscapes. The researchers called it "visual elevator music."

Ben Mazza

Apr 73 min read