> we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi. AI is democratizing _ex

> we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi. AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful. Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny. (Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.) So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort. [0] https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-crater-tenerife/ https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-... [1] https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-rich-colors-of-studio-ghibli/ https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-ri... [2] https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/ https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/ [3] https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-essential-storytelling-tool/ https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-es... [4] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away...