GenAI Is Our Polyester
33 comments
·June 3, 2025proc0
owebmaster
These past 2 days I have seen some very entertaining short videos made with veo3 in my feed, I'm surprised. Brazilians are creating some really funny mashups of old historic moments with current brazilian culture and slangs. I can see a creative editor making a top quality movie with it.
palmotea
> Brazilians are creating some really funny mashups of old historic moments with current brazilian culture and slangs.
For a time, it was popular to use ChatGPT to translate text into "pirate speak," or something similar. You don't seem much of that anymore.
owebmaster
pirate speak was only fun for a very particular small subset of LLM users, the early adopters. Those videos I'm talking about are as good as any high quality movie scene.
proc0
True, it's definitely another tool for creative people already and will at least create a new genre in many categories. The question is whether it will become the dominant force for creative works across the board.
soulofmischief
Reminds me of the Transcendental Painting Group in the early 20th century around Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose members explored the nature of substance and form and spirituality within the total abstract.
It was a reaction to the fact that too many contemporary painters in the region focused on landscapes, capturing the beauty of the area through rigid photorealism. This was seen to TPG as derivative and completely missing the essence of painting; after all, cameras were now able to take increasingly vivid shots of natural landscapes, and as such the value of such paintings began to decline.
An excerpt from their manifesto:
The Transcendental Painting Group is composed of artists who are concerned with the development and presentation of various types of non-representational painting; painting that finds its source in the creative imagination and does not depend upon the objective approach.
The word Transcendental has been chosen as a name for the group because it best expresses its aim, which is to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual. The work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems. Methods may vary.
One future is in realtime hypercontextualization... Art installations which prize subjectivity more than TPG could ever hope to achieve in their time, creating the abstract not from the mind of the artist, but the observer. Art which is not just observed subjectively, but created subjectively, the observer being able to fully experience themselves from new angles, guided by the hand of the artist.
These installations may be physical or digital, and will use all sorts of signals as input. Local signals, remote signals, colors, shapes, sounds, brain waves, weather patterns, HUMINT, data dumps, trending topics... you name it. Any information will be fair game for integration and resynthesization. Observers will weep, will walk away with a new feeling or realization about themselves, will stay up that night staring at the ceiling and contemplating deep, unearthed aspects of themselves. And for some installations, the observer may continue to participate with the installation over a period of time, whether in person or digitally, and sometimes in a way which incorporates the interactions between observers. This kind of experience is only possible at scale with generative art.
And while still a pipe dream 10 years ago, it's become an increasingly viable reality, especially with the recent upgrade to GPT 4o's generation capabilities, or tools like Sora, or the incredible community tooling around Stable Diffusion, etc.
delis-thumbs-7e
If I am not mistaken, was not cotton itself - while known and used outside Europe for thousands of years - the polyester, a kind or wonder textile, of the 18th Century Europe that drove the British colonial expansion, the global slave trade and ultimately, in the form of Spinning Jenny, the industrial revolution?
Strangely, while I disagree completely with the writer, I actually think he is completely correct in his analogy, although not the way he intended. I don’t believe AI will be a revolution the way Spinning Jenny, electronic computer or the Internet were. I believe it will be exactly like polyester, in a sense that it will be hyped for a bit, then people find the hype a bit of a silly fad, and after a while just get bored of it while it has become ubiquitous and plain common.
Same way the oat milk carton will be designed by an AI bot directed by some senior advertising agent - as it probably is already - and some video game turned blockbuster video is slapped together by a supervisor and bunch of bots - as it probably is already - but people will flog to see something that is masterful and make them feel genuine human emotions.
AI is a tool like any other and while I’m certain some future creative master will use it to make something truly stunning, without human creativity and innovation it will just churn out some boring slag that while vaguely useful nevertheless make us feel kinda bored and empty inside - kinda like my polyester sweatpants.
legulere
I like the comparison with plastics: it is often only used because it is cheaper than the alternatives with worse results. Also there’s a pollution problem.
kazinator
> The stigma against polyester persists even now.
Not in active wear / sports clothing!
jxjnskkzxxhx
Genai could, in principle, evolve/change to a point where people cannot detect it, rendering the entire argument flawed.
initramfs
cheap clothing is still sold..
decimalenough
Yup, Shein etc use a lot of polyester and polyester blends because it's cheap.
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DonHopkins
> John Waters could conjure up an intense feeling of kitsch by just naming his film Polyester.
Looking forward to scratch-n-sniff Odorama GenAI!
feraldidactic
So a metaphorical soft plastic whose external poisoning costs at almost every stage of existence are delusionally externalized.
Nailed it.
inshard
Polyester solved minor issues in fabrics and was generally less comfortable and less odor-resistant than cotton. AI, by contrast, is dynamic and steadily removing pain points with no serious competition from non-AI solutions. The title is catchy, but the comparison doesn’t hold up.
jweir
Polyester is still used extensively but it isn’t the replacement industry wanted. Folks overdid it and found a good balance.
We will overshoot with GenAI and over use it. Eventually rolling back and finding a better balance.
Lewis Mumford had an essay about this - how we don’t need turn the speakers up to 10 just because we can.
jxjnskkzxxhx
> Polyester is still used extensively but it isn’t the replacement industry wanted
This is almost always the case. It's very rare that an improvement is better than the original in everything.
The new thing is always sold as universally better, and some times it takes a while for the mass consciousness of people to figure out that the new is better in some respects but the old is still better in others.
cpursley
Maybe not but it led to much higher quality synthetic and hybrid clothing. It's insane how much cheaper and better clothing is than even 20 years ago.
dontlaugh
I disagree with you on AI, the results are clearly poor.
I agree on polyester, though. I sweat and itch wearing polyester clothing, even relatively low blends. Maybe not an issue for everyone, but to me it’s clearly an inferior fabric.
ekianjo
That seems like a bad analogy, and reasoning by analogy is usually not helpful because no new technology is like what came before it. And there is no backlash for polyester, it still exists everywhere and is part of most fabric mix. If anything Polyester has won by being invisible.
Interesting analogy. The obvious reason so far is that GenAI has very generic output, and struggles massively with specific prompts. Errors aside, even when it gets it right it tends to be like some kind of average of the art style, character or scene. This still has its uses but for any interesting art project or product, the expectation is something unique and novel.
If GenAI can overcome its generic output issue and somehow can tap into some algorithm that gives it more creativity, then I think it will not be like polyester, and it will revolutionize art like photography or film did in the early 20th century.