Turns out AI is even less creative than we thought

You can't scroll socials nowadays without seeing AI allegations being thrown around, whether it's a soulless ad campaign or a piece of mysterious 'artwork'. Sometimes it's blaringly obvious, while othertimes there's that uncanny feeling that something artificial is afoot, and now studies have revealed that sixth sense is no coincidence.

It turns out AI loves to recycle the same 12 tropes, resulting in that formulaic, gaussian-blurred imagery that many of us have come to loathe. While there are ways to use AI properly for productivity, creative originality is clearly not the technology's forte.

In a recent study published in the data science journal, Patterns, researchers conducted a classic game of telephone between two AI models (Stable Diffusion XL and LLaVA). Like a game of prompt ping pong, the models were asked to generate images back and forth for 100 rounds. Predictably, they soon deviated from their original prompt, but most notably, they'd regress to a selection of 12 visual motifs.

Akin to what researchers called “visual elevator music,” the images often resulted in themes such as, pastoral landscapes, rainy nightscapes, coastal beaches and fancy interiors that resembled only the most uninspired corporate stock imagery. With 1000 different iterations, it's clear that AI struggles to create visual diversity, reverting to the dozen Western-centred tropes.

It's been understood for some time that AI has a diversity issue, but discovering that its most common visual tropes can be condensed to just 12 motifs is alarming. In a sea of AI ads and soulless art, this revelation goes to show just how important human-made art is in today's climate.