No one has their thinking cap on

Democratising creativity is a luxury belief

It’s been a haunted week in Utopia. Meta and OpenAI revealed themselves locked in an arms race to build the infinite slop ad machine; friend.com embarked on a guerilla, OOH sterility-ragebait project to launch the world’s first wearable oxymoron—a companionship device to be worn alone; and both OpenAI and Anthropic made early bids at humanist redemption through their respective brand campaigns. The former unspooled its 35mm sentiment machine, while the latter opened the doors to its boutique mimesis third space. At least the pastel hues were IRL this time.

While these campaigns posed as proof of AI’s humanity, they were actually a test of our own. And we failed. The accelerators of cultural blandness proved in their marketing campaigns that they are already succeeding at the erosion of taste. Worse still, they didn’t need to make the case for redemption—we volunteered it freely, mistaking clean colours for ethical weight for the small price of a flat white and the post-postmodern dunce cap.

The surface was convincing. Only a creative agency could conjure those halcyon frames of humanity. Crimsons, canaries, burgundies, and golds ambushed a sea of sore eyes across the globe, dwarfing the deep viridians and off-teals bleeding from the shadows. Is it real? Or is it godless pageantry—performative rites we, the non-agentic consumer, must endure, as we shuffle through an arrangement of hex codes, faintly emblematic of times we’re fonder of?

This week felt ceremonial. Each event unfurled like a mimetic fever dream, cloaked in the fabrics of nostalgia, intimacy, childhood, or moral rehabilitation. Each frame strained to imbue mass-scale simulation with the illusion of soul. Each an attempt to euphemise simulacra as artefact—with stakes, with flesh and bloodied ordeal—like a balloon artist contorting placid latex into a farmyard animal through air and dexterous volition. You could smell the ozone of a cultural short-circuit.

While a visceral recoil to a permanently-eavesdropping pendant and the infinite slop/t machine is to be somewhat expected, most were pleasantly surprised—if not enamoured—by the two major brand campaigns. And yet, very few were compelled to look beneath the surface-level aesthetics to grasp the existential battleground underfoot.

The new context window

We are being buried under the spectacle of creative salvation, staged as AI’s benevolence. Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to reclaim the human frame. But to humanise a product whose purpose is its polar inverse is a Sisyphean task. You cannot anthropomorphise machined artificiality. We need not salvation, but purgatory. We need ontological redemption, and however endearing the vessel’s appearance, it remains a charade.

I can appreciate the effective craft of these creative agencies, and the earnest commercial mission both giants are undertaking. How could I berate them? I’ve argued all year that irreducible aesthetics (taste) and ontological weight (craft) are the only moats in the AI era, and both companies have conceded to these maxims in their own sales liturgies.

But when ad copy and collateral arrive draped in existential promise, the barons steering the trillion-dollar intelligence machines must be judged by the stakes they themselves invoke. The burden of proof rests with them: to show us how the human matters in a system optimised to render us optional. No amount of humanwashing, however gorgeous or nostalgic, will absolve them of this duty.

“Sora/Vibes, not a sight for sorer eyes”

Democratising creativity is a luxury belief

Driving my current torment is a proverb that everyone seems to hold, yet few have interrogated:

‘AI is good because it is democratising creativity.’

This is the universal axiom top of mind for AI bulls. It is also a textbook luxury belief. In practice, ‘democratising creativity’ will do far more harm than good.

Recall Rob Henderson’s definition:

“Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”

‘AI will democratise creativity’ fits this mould precisely. It confers status on elites while eroding the cognitive foundations of everyone else. Its holders retain access, scarcity, faculty, and agency—along with the economic windfalls these endowments produce. Its subjects lose the very capacity to develop them.

‘AI will democratise creativity’ is a seductive maxim to wield. It signals four things: tech-literacy, avant-gardism, benevolence, and egalitarianism. That is to say:

a) you understand the technology;

b) you’re ahead of the curve;

c) you want others to benefit; and

d) everyone should be equally ‘creative’.

For the moral puritans among us, such postures are irresistible. Techno-optimist noblesse oblige offers a rare prize: insulation from the vices of both collectivism and capitalism, while preserving the virtues of each—empathy for all, and the best of markets and human ingenuity.

As many intellectual forebears of this phenomenon have predicted, this belief resolves cleanly into a class war. The status markers of intellectual and cultural superiority are unmistakable. It implicitly (and usually falsely) screams I understand this tech and you don’t, and my taste and creative output is unthreatened by these tools. But, perhaps more importantly: I care about inclusion.

But these AI elites do not use AI to create their own art. Look at OpenAI’s brand campaign this week. When fawning, eloquent consumer epitaphs emerged (“It’s giving Apple”), the irony was stark. Aesthetically, the palette was mirrored. But the means to that end were outsourced.

Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign showed skin in the game (sorry Nassim). It embedded the tool’s promise inside the artefact itself.

Where was ‘Made by ChatGPT?’

(we know where, on the cutting room floor)

I still don’t really get why Taleb gets so mad about the misrepresentation

OpenAI didn’t trust its own model to make the thing that sells the model. Instead, it paid real money to real creatives for real craft. They claim AI improves access to the best creative output for all, but still privately pay for scarce, exquisite anthropocentricity. They have capitulated to the truths of epistemic rigour, craft, and ontological weight—at least when it comes to their own brand. The hypocrisy is laid bare: OpenAI is marketing a product designed to evacuate the very qualities they rely on to make it desirable.

“We believe it empowers you, but we don’t use it ourselves.” - them, probably

Stripping away the sociological posture of ‘democratising creativity’ to examine the raw economic logic, we find that holding this belief is not merely costless, but wealth-generating across multiple layers.

The existing cohort of cultural elites—established writers, artists, designers, and filmmakers—hold creative status by definition. Their identity and social capital are already secure, and they do not need to distinguish themselves further through output. As cultural homogenisation deepens, their signatures accrue even greater value as they become further insulated from the slop market. Quality competition wanes, while their artefacts command more resonance with age. What prevails is culture capture: incumbents do not merely survive homogenisation—they profit from it.¹ They gain from the democratisation of creativity because endless imitation raises the price of the inimitable and the ontologically-dense artefact.

For non-creative elites—like founders, software engineers, executives, investors, consultants, and product managers—their power does not stem from producing cultural artefacts, but administering the conditions under which creation occurs. They supervise creation rather than creating themselves. Their output is process. Their proximity to creation is managerial, not generative—yet that supervision masquerades as altruism when the distribution of creative tools is mistaken for creativity itself. For them, democratised creativity is moral leverage: proof they are benevolent vanguards optimising the future on everyone’s behalf.

But how about socialising the costs? The obvious lament is well-worn: extracted rents from creative labour, and power-law returns accruing to platforms rather than makers. I resist the lazy socialism fashionable in the zoomer milieu. What I do proselytise is cultural homogenisation as the true externality of the AI age—like a digital, slop-driven climate crisis, except the atmosphere is our collective epistemic and aesthetic faculty.

Infinite slop floods the zone with stale, replicated mediocrity, dulling the cognitive blades we once used to discern and engage with artefact. Each derivative cycle lowers the signal-to-noise ratio until sophistication itself feels pretentious. The capacity to parse beauty, irony, mastery, or labour, erodes under the constant abrasion of the algorithmic mean.

In time, our cognitive bar falls downward—we cease to expect effort, then to perceive it. Curation sours into consumption. The process of refinement is violated, and high taste is drowned out by the cacophony of infinite, frictionless recall.

The result is mass epistemic anaesthesia: a society fluent in content and illiterate in meaning, incapable of parsing the beauty and mastery that adorned the creative mediums in the first place. The ideals of a utopian creative renaissance give way to a society whose culture is severed from the meaning that once gave it shape.

funny how cycles work / swear I just know my worth, swear I just know my worth / funny how cycles work

We arrive at a simple model of modern class gatekeeping. The non-creative elites finance, administer, and moralise the technology—while the creative elites aestheticise its aftermath and retail faux authenticity back to the masses, eroding their cognitive bulwark in the process. The former arbitrage virtue; the latter arbitrage scarcity. Both profit from excluding the masses from their cloistered sanctuaries of taste and opulence, while the public bad—cultural illiteracy—festers unabated.

‘AI will democratise creativity’ is a pernicious luxury belief because it renders the average cultural product more homogenous—thereby increasing the scarcity value of true originality, which elites alone are buffered to perceive and access. Technologists preaching this sermon are not merely insulated from its costs, but their long term wealth accumulation depends on the proliferation of the belief itself. They must sell the maxim to inflate their equity.

For everyone else, the flattening of taste becomes self-reinforcing: our epistemic bar ratchets downward until we can no longer recognise meaningful aesthetics or craft at all. Class calcifies through this slow digital emancipation and cultural colonialism. We proles are left to consume slop, mistake it for art, and lose the very faculty needed to know the difference—an aimless herd groping through a maze of pure simulacra, guided only by milquetoast sloptainment.

Let them eat slop

You can see the spoils of this victory happening in real time. Everyone is lauding Anthropic’s ‘deeply human’ brand play, which was just a pop-up store with cool merch, and some VSCO presets, all shot on 35mm. This pastime is commonplace in chic cultural consumer markets—a kind of curated ephemerality that is a staple of lifestyle branding. It is as performative as taste gets. But how can you blame them? They’ve proved their own victory—the universal adoration simply confirms what we suspected: we already lack the epistemic sophistication to ponder anything deeper than some nostalgia totems and a warmth dial.

Takeaway coffees and some dad hats, maybe Australia is the home of ‘T’aste after all

OpenAI’s ChatGPT brand campaign was their first marketing collateral that felt faintly encouraging. They have capitulated to the cultural moats and the necessity of ontology. But at best, OpenAI’s brand vignettes are humanwashing by idyllic portrait. These are IKEA-realism dioramas: film warmth and halation around curtains, in a permanent golden hour. A welcome departure from the aseptic minimalism, this pastoral daydream of procedural living is aspirational, but entirely antithetical to the product they are marketing.

The irony is most aptly shown in Spontaneity with ChatGPT, where we literally sit shotgun to a brother and sister about to embark on a surprise road trip, organised by the former. The aesthetics are gorgeous—a sweet serendipity is in the air, cushioned by a lush mountainside backdrop. But then comes the reveal: rather than courting chance, they are delegating it to ChatGPT. Their itinerary, brokered by the model, confuses true spontaneity (living without plans) with outsourced logistics (planning done by someone else). And lo, the emperor is once again unclothed as adventure is collapsed into concierge, and true discovery—an extension of the human experience—is pre-optimised like a settings toggle. We want to go on the journey, not have it solved for us.

This is not to say the utility won’t appeal. It will. It is objectively excellent marketing. Both campaigns convert. But this hype cycle has shown just how low the epistemological bar for taste in AI truly sits. A merch run and a few Jonze-esque domestic vignettes are celebrated, filed as evidence of humanity. This is affect laundering: routing the aura of 35mm and coffee culture—modern talismans of leisure—into a product whose telos is the quiet erasure of the human experience altogether.

Omg timber *texture*, i feel warmer looking at this image

What’s more revealing than the Claude pop-up itself is how eagerly the crowd lined up to humanise the machine for free. But we should not discard these NPCs as harmlessly complicit when the stakes, by the builders’ own admission, are nothing less than the future of thought and creative expression. The thinking caps are actually pawns in a far grander legitimisation project: one that promises creative emancipation for all, but delivers cultural homogenisation at the expense of our cognitive faculties.

When some sexy freebies are all it takes to restore faith in AI and humanity’s fusion, the grift has already succeeded. Aesthetic flattery now stands in for ethical scrutiny, and the epistemic bar for taste has collapsed. A population disembowelled of its creative instinct no longer possesses the epistemic immune system to defend culture from the simulation of slopvibes.

The true genius of this campaign is that Anthropic realised they don’t need to convince the world they can reclaim humanism—if they make it cool or ‘T’asteful, the consumer will do it for them. They’ve hijacked the highest-stakes ethical-creative dialectic and repackaged it as a mimetic status good, harvesting performative discernment as moral collateral. Surface-level aesthetic fluency becomes moral cover. Vibes become proxy for values. The (700 deep, 3 hours in a queue) crowd ghostwrites the moral alibi for creativity’s erosion for the small price of a (free) hat and a pourover.²

My new thigh tattoo

The tech world is at such a low bar of cultural literacy that judgement has been replaced by fleeting observation, meaning a crafty-enough narrative can exploit the existential stakes for creativity at hand. ‘The colours are nice,’ ‘thinking with taste,’ and ‘the vibes are high,’ are remarks so vacuous that they slide, without resistance, into ‘the company is good,’ and ‘they must be dealing with the creative implications responsibly.’

This semantic slippage formulates the existential bait and switch: we are lured in by the appearance of taste—cultural affordances typically associated with artistic sincerity—and the luxury exclusivity, and then, without noticing, are nudged, imperceptibly, into internalising the deeper fiction: that the machine must be moral if it looks beautiful. That the integrity of the creative process must be intact if they dress themselves this well. Ironically, the very condition that enables this—the slow erosion of creative discernment—is the problem we should be solving, but instead, we are celebrating its rotten fruits.

How impoverished must your imagination be—how fully atrophied your aesthetic barometer—if all it takes to firm your faith in AI is a luxury signal? Is the price of your cultural agency an Instagram story? Does your p(doom) tick downward with each serif-font-embroidered accessory so generously bestowed upon you?

Welcome to the era of humanwashing. You’re being bribed with merch to narrate the fictional humanity of the very deity you’ve spent two years insisting will render you creatively obsolete. Not only are you aestheticising your own erosion of taste—your own surrender of creative agency—you’re doing it for free.

This is not a denial of Anthropic’s effectiveness—quite the contrary. Of course the campaign was successful. It did exactly what good marketing should: it met the median consumer’s conception of taste and sold it back to them as revelation. No one is disputing Anthropic’s success or popularity. The rub is a simple category error committed by its blind disciples—in assuming that mimetic ubiquity signals creative virtue, or ontological weight. The genius was not in the supposed ‘T’aste, but in faking taste so well that tasteless people called it genius. It was neither human nor tasteful, but it made tasteless humans think it was both human and tasteful, and they reaped the dividends of humanwashing at no cost.

Breaking: Elites like luxury status goods

You took off your thinking cap to put on your thinking™️ cap

I find myself occupying an unpopular position. How can I not feel like ‘old man yells at digital cloud?’ “Aren’t you engaging in the very cultural elitism you condemn?” “Wow, you’re a hater.” “It’s not that deep.” Besides, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Shouldn’t we be praising these companies for taking a step in the right direction?

These are reasonable objections, but I want us to do better. I don’t want us to laud aesthetic gestures as consolation prizes in the same breath we fret over the existential stakes of creativity. I don’t want to marvel at shallow taste because it’s cool, exclusive, or mimetic, and I certainly do not want to inflate that enthusiasm into pretending Anthropic is living up to its name. We cannot roll over that easy.

Those concerned with the ethics of ‘democratising creativity’ would be better off cultivating discernment and restoring cultural integrity than cheerleading equal access to the slop machine. There is no dignity in mistaking validation for elevation. To truly democratise creativity is to restore the faculties of perception and discernment—to teach the pedagogy of awe, and to re-open the humbling apprenticeship to mastery. There are no shortcuts. The morality lies in improving the accessibility to the comprehension of depth—a much more progressive posture than the pyrrhic victory of improving the accessibility to thoughtless expression.

It is harmless, perhaps even necessary, to acknowledge the charm of these campaigns as progress. This is not a criticism of their makers. But as humans, many of whom claim to fear the existential implications of AI, we’ve failed the very first test of our creative resistance. Under the guise of ‘handing everyone a paintbrush,’ we capitulated to the existential stakes of creation because its maker had clean aesthetics and performative taste.³ If you truly believe Claude is for thinkers with taste, you definitely don’t have the latter, and you probably do not qualify as the former.

The concession to taste, and ontological weight, is overdue. But I retain that the humanist redemption curve is asymptotic. The artificial part of artificial intelligence means humanism is impossible. We didn’t ask for ersatz humanity, and we do not want it. The fashion cycles will prove discursive grist for the internet mill, but the existential stakes will not be resolved by faux humanism and a Pentax.

Thankfully, right now, there are more genuinely sublime published creative works than at any other point in history. Thanks to technology and the internet, they are more accessible than they have ever been before. If only we were capable of noticing.

1. Desperately tried to rephrase this but couldn’t do it in a non-cooked way. Oneshotted, guilty as charged I guess

2. Handy ROI, media buyers take notes

3. Some Claude Air Max 95s and a bag of Ona Raspberry Candy and I’ll be in the queue