Date: January 2nd, 2026 1:27 PM
Author: Gary Bussy
not flame: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/style/trends-predictions-2026.html
Reflecting your maker doesn’t mean doing just what they’d like — it’s a lesson taught through Adam and Eve and Frankenstein’s monster, too. So when artificial intelligence spits out images that look close to being human-generated but are just a little off, it’s no surprise.
A.I. might be trained on human art, but it has its own house style: slick, almost too polished, bumps retouched, like a smooth-talking car salesman. We call it slop, but the look is, if anything, sleeker and less textured than what humans tend to produce.
In 2026, as people grow weary of the inundation of slop, we’ll see a turn away from it and an embrace of art, text and other creative endeavors that embody the Japanese term wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection and delight in things that haven’t had their edges smoothed out.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5816072&forum_id=2#49556496)