I wrote a Substack post for a different Substack
It's about AI and textiles.
Hello subscribers to the Mike newsletter!
Do you not already subscribe to Blood in the Machine, the tech and Luddism newsletter from my former VICE colleague and friend Brian Merchant? That surprises and deeply, deeply disappoints me.
But you can fix that starting right now, because I wrote a guest post over there. It’s about chintz, the centuries-old textile handicraft from India, and the qualities that make AI images chintzy.
Here’s a little preview:
Every time a generative AI image model gets released or updated, a similar cycle plays out: AI power users rush to test its capabilities, and highlight what they think are the most novel or meme-worthy examples. One of them goes viral, maybe more. Then, more and more people toy with the model and post the results online, and if I can, I test it out myself. Before long, whatever might have been compelling at first has eroded completely, and the effect of literally anything generated with the new software is that it just looks chintzy—by which I mean mechanical, cookie-cutter, and depressingly empty from an aesthetic standpoint.
For instance, it took approximately one week for the ChatGPT Ghibli meme to dissolve into chintz, and now certain images from actual Studio Ghibli movies make me wince, an effect I hope will be temporary, because nothing could be less chintzy than a painstakingly animated Studio Ghibli movie. But a piece of AI tech has come along and done its nasty work to the masters at Ghibli: zeroed in on something of surpassing beauty and turned it into chintz for fun and profit.
This feels like the only correct word. We use “chintzy” to describe something that has a deliberate aesthetic dimension—floral curtains, for instance—but which is obviously mechanized, causing it to seem cheap. Often something perceived as chintzy strikes a false note not because the consumer is a snob who knows better, but because the cheapness is so easily discerned it’s impossible for anyone not to notice.
Overwhelmingly on social media, chintzy AI images appear to be a statement. According to the writer Gareth Watkins, this is because the use of AI that I call “chintzy” and Watkins says “looks like shit” communicates group identity:
“No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it. […] Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs.”
Capital has been here before with chintz—by which I mean real chintz, an artisanal craft from India. “Chintz” is originally a Hindi word, and if you're like most people, you’ve probably got the term all wrong. The type of pattern you associate with the world’s ugliest oven mitts and knockoff Lilly Pulitzer dresses is actually a sanded down, industrialized version of a visually rich handicraft that was first created about 400 years ago, in Hyderabad, India and flourished for at least decades before Europeans started importing it in high volume. I first encountered it in this context when my wife and I were in Jaipur, Rajasthan in 2019, and the rickshaw driver showing us around suggested we peek into a shop where handmade chintz is manufactured.