technology

I dunno, a lot of the early (pre-commercially viable) versions of these tools were significantly more interesting largely in virtue of the fact that they didn't reliably give you exactly what you wanted. As a kind of creative tool, that can actually be useful (or at the very least produce output that's not just more of the same). The early Deep Dream versions where it hallucinated eyes and dogs all over everything (e.g. ) at least had a distinctive psychedelic style that was kind of neat, and suggesting things like “Why Are Men’s Penises in Such a Tizzy?” or “Spiders Are Getting Smarter, and So, So Loud” as NYT opinion columns is actually pretty funny. In both those cases, it's the failure mode that's interesting in virtue of the gap between what people were asking for and what they were getting. There's some space to play in there. As tech companies managed to round off those sharp corners and move toward commercial viability, this sort of light surrealism converged on the homogenous slop we all hate today. Part of what makes these things suck so hard is that they're totally frictionless: they will bend over backward to do exactly what you want exactly how you want it, while also producing something that looks exactly like how you'd expect the exact average of every piece of art ever produced would look. It's both sycophantic and boring, and the output is the artistic version of pink slime formed into the shape of different foods.