AI has democratized creation, and it will only keep doing it more from here because, as the saying goes, “this is the worst AI will ever be.” And when creation is being democratized, and more people have the ability to create, everything starts to look the same.

I do think that anyone being able to design, code, or do all the other things that used to require years of technical skill and practice to master is extraordinary, and I mean that without any irony. It’s perhaps one of the most significant shifts in human capability I’ve witnessed. (I am still young, will be 27 in April, so you can say that I haven’t experienced that much at my age, but I’ve been blessed with a curiosity that allowed me to delve deeper into things beyond my culture and reach. One of my qualities or “toxic” traits is that I question things. A lot.)

This shift that AI is fostering makes me think deeply about what’s going to happen next, because at some point, everyone will have access to the same tools, models, and everything else AI is offering. And the things they create will begin to converge toward a center because most of them will be generated by AI using simple prompts without imbuing them with their own inputs. And this leads to more sameness, because the outputs come from the same aesthetic or structure that an AI tool uses. Without personal input, it carries people toward the same thing, and unless this gravity is resisted deliberately, we all end up somewhere familiar.

In my journey of observing the world around me and myself, and since the boom of “vibe coding” (you are letting an AI agent bring an idea of yours to life through code; it’s one of the most groundbreaking things that has ever happened, at least in my journey, and also an element that sparked this essay), many websites started to feel the same way because at the core of each agent there is a specific structure and aesthetic that gets followed. But this goes beyond coding, as I’ve observed it as well in illustrations, in videos, and in many other things that are part of my daily life. I felt this even in the conversations I’ve had with designers, artists, and even with people who have nothing to do with creative work.

The common thread that I’ve found in all of my conversations and observations is that something specific is missing from the things that surround them. And that something is taste, and when taste is honest, it becomes a kind of authenticity.

Taste to me is discernement while authenticity is the alignment between what you are and what you make. The best way to develop great taste is to simply be yourself, and to stay with yourself long enough that you can actually tell what you like from what you were told to like.

And I believe that shortly, behind everything that is being created, there will be a mechanism that will make things feel different, that will represent taste. This mechanism is the logic that stays behind what we know as generative art.

Generative art is art created through code. A creator writes a set of rules (through a logic/algorithm) and then allows that system to produce the work. The beautiful thing about it is that the system that was created by the artist is the one drawing the line, and every time it runs, it draws differently. It’s the same set of rules, but the variations are infinite.

The artist’s role shifts from making the piece to designing the conditions that produce the piece. They decide the color palette, but not which exact color appears where. They define the forms that are possible, but not which form emerges. They set the boundaries, and then they let go.

The final output is something the artist intended but didn’t predict. Even though many argue that the final output doesn’t belong to the artist but to the machine, I’d say that by shaping the system behind the artwork, they’ve already imbued the piece with their way of seeing. To me, the real art behind “generative art” is the logic itself.

And for those who are not aware of generative art (as I wasn’t until a couple of years ago), it’s been with us for some decades now. Vera Molnár was doing this in the 1960s, writing algorithms by hand before she ever touched a computer, exploring what happens when you introduce controlled randomness into geometric composition. Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, and Manfred Mohr are other artists who, together with Vera, understood that the most interesting creative act might not be making the thing, but designing the system that makes the thing.

Vera Molnar, De La Série (Des) Ordres, 1974. Courtesy of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection

More recently, generative art found a new life on the blockchain (it is there where I first encountered it) with projects like Art Blocks, and artists like Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak who released algorithms that produced thousands of unique works from a single codebase.

What I’ve started to think about generative art is that at its core, it’s not about technology but about the relationship between a creator’s vision and the system that expresses it. The code is the medium, and taste (what the artist actually wants to share/create, not what it’s supposed to) becomes the message.

And I believe that logic is about to move far beyond art, and it will become the logic of how many things are made.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but now I believe AI is only accelerating it. The generative process, where a creator designs a system, and the system produces unique variations, will enter industries that have never thought about code or algorithms, and it will change what those industries are capable of offering.

This has already happened in some industries, and the example that feels most immediate to me is fashion.

A couple of years ago, the brand 9dcc (which no longer exists) released a collection of tees made in collaboration with Eric Snowfro (Founder of Art Blocks), in which each tee featured a unique graphic of a Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro, making each shirt 100% unique with the corresponding digital NFT linked to the physical.

Another, and even better example, is what Dani Loftus (one of the most visionary people I “know”) released through DRAUP: a generative digital shapewear collection entitled REDUCE. The collection critiqued the beauty standards created by social media, filters, and even AI-generated bodies. Each piece was generated at mint through a custom algorithm that blended six exaggerated internet body archetypes, randomly assigned voxel sizes that “compress” the digital body, and set unique pattern scales, making every output one of a kind. This is generative art used as a critique, where the logic of the system is the commentary.

“REDUCE”

I see more and more fashion brands following the steps of Dani or 9dcc, where instead of designing a single garment and producing ten thousand identical copies, the brand designs a generative system (a set of rules governing silhouette, pattern, color, and proportion) and that system produces a collection where every piece is a variation. Each piece is part of the same family, but no two pieces are the same.

The design is generated digitally, but brought to life physically, and the person holding the garment doesn’t need to know about the code underneath.

But I’d argue that this generative system also changes the relationship between a person and the things they own because if used in a way that a brand creates only the base and allows for the output to belong to the buyers, the object purchased becomes something more personal as it now carries both signatures: the brand’s taste in the system, and the buyer’s taste in the choices they made within it. The entire exchange becomes a co-creation that changes what the relationship between a brand and its people can be.

When I think the future is generative, I am thinking about one in which creators and brands design systems that allow for an entirely new kind of relationship between people and the things they choose.

And fashion is only one example. The logic can be applied to architecture, to furniture, to digital products, and to many of the things that we don’t even think (today) that they can benefit from such a system.

The generative process allows for customized outcomes at a scale and speed that wasn’t possible before. And I believe that’s what people are going to want more and more, because in this age of artificial everything, they’ll gravitate toward the things that feel different.

This is also where I think one of the most important distinctions of this discussion becomes clear: the difference between a prompt (which asks for an outcome) and a generative system (which expresses a worldview). In other words, prompting is “make me a thing”, while authoring a system is “this is how I see”, making the outcome closely tied to our identity.

This leads me to another element that will be impacted, which is a cultural consequence.

When people start choosing things that come from a particular generative system because the taste encoded resonates with theirs, they will find each other. I would even argue that it will all happen organically, without the need for marketing or audience building in the way we currently understand it.

Think about what a band t-shirt used to do. You wore it, and someone across the room recognized it, and you were instantly sharing with one another a set of values, references, and feelings that didn’t need to be explained. The t-shirt was the signal, while the culture was underneath.

What I’m describing is something similar, but the new signal becomes the generative logic itself. Two people who generated from the same system will recognize each other, even though the output is different, because the aesthetic DNA is visible. The shared origin shows through, even when the expressions are different, in the same way you can hear the same instrument being played in two different songs.

And these clusters of shared “something” will become subcultures, communities, and even movements. I can see it already in what Dani’s collection started. New aesthetic languages that emerge from a system’s logic, embraced by many and expressed individually.

Not one style for everyone, but many styles for many selves, each one carrying the specificity that makes it meaningful. This is what I’d call generative culture. Belonging through shared origin.

The current model of cultural identity is built on sameness. You signal who you are by wearing what everyone else in your group wears, and the logo is the look. What generative logic does is invert that, where the logo becomes the logic, and the system becomes the brand. And through it, belonging is expressed through variation instead of repetition.

I think this will define something about the next era. I think this will change how brands operate, how communities form, and how people relate to the objects in their lives, and through those objects, to each other. I think the shift from mass production to generative production is as significant as the shift from handmade to industrial, opening a space that didn’t previously exist.

I might be completely wrong about this, but I’ve carried this belief for a while now, way before the current AI moment and the conversations about democratized creation that are everywhere today.

It all started with my own feelings, with the things I’ve seen people choosing and doing, with the flood of everything on social media, with the desire to be like X or Y, and with other behaviors that made us distance ourselves from who we actually are.

And when I first started playing with AI more in 2022, these feelings only accelerated because the sameness became more visible, and I started feeling more and more a hunger for difference. When you can see the convergence clearly, you understand intuitively why divergence has value.

When I first discovered generative art and understood the way it works, I started believing more and more in the way it’s going to impact the world, even if it is being narrowed solely to art, and sadly, completely neglected by most people.

The things that can be done today with AI and generative systems are already remarkable. I am not sure what will be possible tomorrow. I don’t know how far things will go. But what I know for sure is that, regardless of how much it evolves and how much better it becomes, the constant will always be the person behind the system. It is they whose taste shapes the logic that shapes the output.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons generative art taught me is that the most profound creative act is designing the conditions under which the thing comes into existence. Choosing the constraints, what’s possible and what isn’t, and trusting that within those boundaries, something alive and specific will emerge, may be where the real magic actually happens.

I believe this lesson is about to enter every industry and creative discipline, and there will come a time when we look back at this moment and recognize it as the point where creation stopped being about identical outputs and started being about systems that produce belonging through difference. And throughout the journey, we may also realize that it is this very difference that makes us, humans, one. Regardless of how different we are at the surface, at our core, there’s a system that connects us all.

The future is generative because machines will finally make it possible for everything to carry the mark of the person who chose it.

The generative future is not about the machines. It is about the taste behind the logic, the self behind the system, and the hidden I behind every act of creation.🌹

AI has democratized creation, and it will only keep doing it more from here because, as the saying goes, “this is the worst AI will ever be.” And when creation is being democratized, and more people have the ability to create, everything starts to look the same.

I do think that anyone being able to design, code, or do all the other things that used to require years of technical skill and practice to master is extraordinary, and I mean that without any irony. It’s perhaps one of the most significant shifts in human capability I’ve witnessed. (I am still young, will be 27 in April, so you can say that I haven’t experienced that much at my age, but I’ve been blessed with a curiosity that allowed me to delve deeper into things beyond my culture and reach. One of my qualities or “toxic” traits is that I question things. A lot.)

This shift that AI is fostering makes me think deeply about what’s going to happen next, because at some point, everyone will have access to the same tools, models, and everything else AI is offering. And the things they create will begin to converge toward a center because most of them will be generated by AI using simple prompts without imbuing them with their own inputs. And this leads to more sameness, because the outputs come from the same aesthetic or structure that an AI tool uses. Without personal input, it carries people toward the same thing, and unless this gravity is resisted deliberately, we all end up somewhere familiar.

In my journey of observing the world around me and myself, and since the boom of “vibe coding” (you are letting an AI agent bring an idea of yours to life through code; it’s one of the most groundbreaking things that has ever happened, at least in my journey, and also an element that sparked this essay), many websites started to feel the same way because at the core of each agent there is a specific structure and aesthetic that gets followed. But this goes beyond coding, as I’ve observed it as well in illustrations, in videos, and in many other things that are part of my daily life. I felt this even in the conversations I’ve had with designers, artists, and even with people who have nothing to do with creative work.

The common thread that I’ve found in all of my conversations and observations is that something specific is missing from the things that surround them. And that something is taste, and when taste is honest, it becomes a kind of authenticity.

Taste to me is discernement while authenticity is the alignment between what you are and what you make. The best way to develop great taste is to simply be yourself, and to stay with yourself long enough that you can actually tell what you like from what you were told to like.

And I believe that shortly, behind everything that is being created, there will be a mechanism that will make things feel different, that will represent taste. This mechanism is the logic that stays behind what we know as generative art.

Generative art is art created through code. A creator writes a set of rules (through a logic/algorithm) and then allows that system to produce the work. The beautiful thing about it is that the system that was created by the artist is the one drawing the line, and every time it runs, it draws differently. It’s the same set of rules, but the variations are infinite.

The artist’s role shifts from making the piece to designing the conditions that produce the piece. They decide the color palette, but not which exact color appears where. They define the forms that are possible, but not which form emerges. They set the boundaries, and then they let go.

The final output is something the artist intended but didn’t predict. Even though many argue that the final output doesn’t belong to the artist but to the machine, I’d say that by shaping the system behind the artwork, they’ve already imbued the piece with their way of seeing. To me, the real art behind “generative art” is the logic itself.

And for those who are not aware of generative art (as I wasn’t until a couple of years ago), it’s been with us for some decades now. Vera Molnár was doing this in the 1960s, writing algorithms by hand before she ever touched a computer, exploring what happens when you introduce controlled randomness into geometric composition. Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, and Manfred Mohr are other artists who, together with Vera, understood that the most interesting creative act might not be making the thing, but designing the system that makes the thing.

Vera Molnar, De La Série (Des) Ordres, 1974. Courtesy of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection

More recently, generative art found a new life on the blockchain (it is there where I first encountered it) with projects like Art Blocks, and artists like Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak who released algorithms that produced thousands of unique works from a single codebase.

What I’ve started to think about generative art is that at its core, it’s not about technology but about the relationship between a creator’s vision and the system that expresses it. The code is the medium, and taste (what the artist actually wants to share/create, not what it’s supposed to) becomes the message.

And I believe that logic is about to move far beyond art, and it will become the logic of how many things are made.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but now I believe AI is only accelerating it. The generative process, where a creator designs a system, and the system produces unique variations, will enter industries that have never thought about code or algorithms, and it will change what those industries are capable of offering.

This has already happened in some industries, and the example that feels most immediate to me is fashion.

A couple of years ago, the brand 9dcc (which no longer exists) released a collection of tees made in collaboration with Eric Snowfro (Founder of Art Blocks), in which each tee featured a unique graphic of a Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro, making each shirt 100% unique with the corresponding digital NFT linked to the physical.

Another, and even better example, is what Dani Loftus (one of the most visionary people I “know”) released through DRAUP: a generative digital shapewear collection entitled REDUCE. The collection critiqued the beauty standards created by social media, filters, and even AI-generated bodies. Each piece was generated at mint through a custom algorithm that blended six exaggerated internet body archetypes, randomly assigned voxel sizes that “compress” the digital body, and set unique pattern scales, making every output one of a kind. This is generative art used as a critique, where the logic of the system is the commentary.

“REDUCE”

I see more and more fashion brands following the steps of Dani or 9dcc, where instead of designing a single garment and producing ten thousand identical copies, the brand designs a generative system (a set of rules governing silhouette, pattern, color, and proportion) and that system produces a collection where every piece is a variation. Each piece is part of the same family, but no two pieces are the same.

The design is generated digitally, but brought to life physically, and the person holding the garment doesn’t need to know about the code underneath.

But I’d argue that this generative system also changes the relationship between a person and the things they own because if used in a way that a brand creates only the base and allows for the output to belong to the buyers, the object purchased becomes something more personal as it now carries both signatures: the brand’s taste in the system, and the buyer’s taste in the choices they made within it. The entire exchange becomes a co-creation that changes what the relationship between a brand and its people can be.

When I think the future is generative, I am thinking about one in which creators and brands design systems that allow for an entirely new kind of relationship between people and the things they choose.

And fashion is only one example. The logic can be applied to architecture, to furniture, to digital products, and to many of the things that we don’t even think (today) that they can benefit from such a system.

The generative process allows for customized outcomes at a scale and speed that wasn’t possible before. And I believe that’s what people are going to want more and more, because in this age of artificial everything, they’ll gravitate toward the things that feel different.

This is also where I think one of the most important distinctions of this discussion becomes clear: the difference between a prompt (which asks for an outcome) and a generative system (which expresses a worldview). In other words, prompting is “make me a thing”, while authoring a system is “this is how I see”, making the outcome closely tied to our identity.

This leads me to another element that will be impacted, which is a cultural consequence.

When people start choosing things that come from a particular generative system because the taste encoded resonates with theirs, they will find each other. I would even argue that it will all happen organically, without the need for marketing or audience building in the way we currently understand it.

Think about what a band t-shirt used to do. You wore it, and someone across the room recognized it, and you were instantly sharing with one another a set of values, references, and feelings that didn’t need to be explained. The t-shirt was the signal, while the culture was underneath.

What I’m describing is something similar, but the new signal becomes the generative logic itself. Two people who generated from the same system will recognize each other, even though the output is different, because the aesthetic DNA is visible. The shared origin shows through, even when the expressions are different, in the same way you can hear the same instrument being played in two different songs.

And these clusters of shared “something” will become subcultures, communities, and even movements. I can see it already in what Dani’s collection started. New aesthetic languages that emerge from a system’s logic, embraced by many and expressed individually.

Not one style for everyone, but many styles for many selves, each one carrying the specificity that makes it meaningful. This is what I’d call generative culture. Belonging through shared origin.

The current model of cultural identity is built on sameness. You signal who you are by wearing what everyone else in your group wears, and the logo is the look. What generative logic does is invert that, where the logo becomes the logic, and the system becomes the brand. And through it, belonging is expressed through variation instead of repetition.

I think this will define something about the next era. I think this will change how brands operate, how communities form, and how people relate to the objects in their lives, and through those objects, to each other. I think the shift from mass production to generative production is as significant as the shift from handmade to industrial, opening a space that didn’t previously exist.

I might be completely wrong about this, but I’ve carried this belief for a while now, way before the current AI moment and the conversations about democratized creation that are everywhere today.

It all started with my own feelings, with the things I’ve seen people choosing and doing, with the flood of everything on social media, with the desire to be like X or Y, and with other behaviors that made us distance ourselves from who we actually are.

And when I first started playing with AI more in 2022, these feelings only accelerated because the sameness became more visible, and I started feeling more and more a hunger for difference. When you can see the convergence clearly, you understand intuitively why divergence has value.

When I first discovered generative art and understood the way it works, I started believing more and more in the way it’s going to impact the world, even if it is being narrowed solely to art, and sadly, completely neglected by most people.

The things that can be done today with AI and generative systems are already remarkable. I am not sure what will be possible tomorrow. I don’t know how far things will go. But what I know for sure is that, regardless of how much it evolves and how much better it becomes, the constant will always be the person behind the system. It is they whose taste shapes the logic that shapes the output.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons generative art taught me is that the most profound creative act is designing the conditions under which the thing comes into existence. Choosing the constraints, what’s possible and what isn’t, and trusting that within those boundaries, something alive and specific will emerge, may be where the real magic actually happens.

I believe this lesson is about to enter every industry and creative discipline, and there will come a time when we look back at this moment and recognize it as the point where creation stopped being about identical outputs and started being about systems that produce belonging through difference. And throughout the journey, we may also realize that it is this very difference that makes us, humans, one. Regardless of how different we are at the surface, at our core, there’s a system that connects us all.

The future is generative because machines will finally make it possible for everything to carry the mark of the person who chose it.

The generative future is not about the machines. It is about the taste behind the logic, the self behind the system, and the hidden I behind every act of creation.🌹