The Same Tools, In Different Hands
Everyone now works with the same tools: the same models, the same interfaces, and often the same prompts, passed around like recipes. More and more, the outputs look alike. They're competent, clean, and interchangeable.
You have probably felt this while scrolling—a Sameness.
That's what averaging machines produce. A model is trained on the sum of what has already been made, and it returns the most probable next thing. That's useful when the task is average. It becomes a problem when what you're trying to make is supposed to be yours.
A few months ago I wrote that aesthetics is literacy, and that an aesthetic is a constant movement toward specificity. I want to carry that thought into this moment. Making things has become cheap, and when that happens, the limit on good work moves somewhere else.
Where the scarcity went
For most of history, the hard part of making was the making itself: skill, time, materials, access. Production was the bottleneck, and the people who could produce were, by default, the people who got to say something.
Now anyone can produce a passable image, essay, deck, or melody in about the time it takes to describe one. The bottleneck has moved from the hand to the eye. What matters is whether you know what you want, and whether you can tell when you have it.
Last week Nikita Huggins wrote here about shifting baseline syndrome: each generation takes the conditions it inherits as normal, even as the reference point quietly degrades. I think something similar happens to taste under automation. If the default output is what we see most, it becomes what we measure against. The baseline drifts toward the probable. You cannot be inspired by what you cannot distinguish, and you cannot distinguish what you never learned to notice.
Aesthetics as noticing
We usually talk about aesthetics as style, a personal touch added at the end. I think it happens much earlier. It's the perceptual work of noticing yourself in relation to other people, other things, and what you value. Why this texture over that one. Why a sentence should stop where it stops. Why one room feels right and another, with the same furniture, doesn't.
Once you can name those choices, you can use them. You can steer a tool toward them, reject what drifts away, and recognize them when they show up where you didn't expect. If you can't name them, the tool's defaults slowly become yours, and you may not notice the moment it happens.
Self-actualization, when making is cheap
Maslow put self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy, the thing you reach once everything below it is taken care of. Cheap production takes care of a lot. What's left is the question underneath the work: who is doing the making, and what are they trying to become through it?
Craft is embodiment when making things. When averaging machines are everywhere, that presence is the one thing that doesn't come for free. It has to be practiced.
The practice
None of this requires calling yourself an artist, and it doesn't require knowing how the models work. It requires attention and some practice turning that attention into language. Most people already have an aesthetic. Very few have ever been asked to name it.
That's what the next AI Literacy masterclass is for. Aesthetics and Self-Actualization is a 90-minute evening session at Index Greenpoint on finding and putting into words your own aesthetic: the thing that makes your work different from someone else's when you're both making the same thing with the same tools. It's for anyone who makes things, whether for work, as a practice, or on the side.
It's a single evening, and it also opens into the longer course if you want to keep going.
Tuesday, October 6, 6:00 to 7:30 PM, Index Greenpoint, 698 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn. Tickets are $100, and the code AW7268 takes 20% off through September 30.
