The AI aesthetic is becoming its own genre

Dan Nielsen is writing about what has happened to the look of AI-generated images. For a while, AI pictures had a particular sheen — a certain gloss, a certain softness, the way they looked like they were painted by someone who had seen too many art books. That look became so recognizable you could spot an AI image on sight.

Now, as the models get better, that look is fading. The new batch doesn't have the tell. It's harder to tell what's real and what's machine-made. And in that sense, the AI aesthetic is becoming its own genre — the way the Dutch Golden Age is its own thing, the way anime is its own thing. It has conventions. It has a history. It will have a place in art history.

Why this matters for us: as the line between human-made and machine-made blurs, the community we're building for — la gente who work with their hands, who value craft — needs to understand what they're buying when they buy the new tools.