GenAI is Our Polyester

The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous "synthetics" lost value in the long-run

For the first half of the 20th century, white-collar workers wore business shirts made from cotton or linen that wrinkled in the wash. Ironing them into a presentable shape required hours of labor each week, or required the time and money to continuously drop them off and pick them up at the dry cleaners.

Science swept in to solve this problem: Chemical conglomerate DuPont learned from experimental research that mixing carboxylic acid and alcohol produced “polyester” fibers that could be used in textile production. Polyester was much stronger and more durable than cotton, especially when double-knit. DuPont then developed their own polyester called Ducron, which felt similar to a natural fiber — but did not wrinkle. A polyester garment could be worn for 68 days straight without needing to be ironed.

From the 1950s onward, DuPont advertised polyester as an efficient solution to reduce household labor. In 1953, fabled American clothier Brooks Brothers introduced "no-iron" / "wash-and-wear" Brooksweave polyester-cotton blend shirts. By the 1970s, however, polyester was everywhere and made by everyone. In particular, no-name industrial manufacturers pumped out shiny polyester garments with vibrant psychedelic patterns — and the much maligned double-knit polyester “leisure suits."

Everyone knows happened next: There was a massive cultural backlash against polyester, which led to the triumphant revaluation of natural fibers such as cotton and linen. The stigma against polyester persists even now. The backlash is often explained as a rejection of its weaknesses as a fiber: polyester's poor aeration makes it feel sticky.

But there was also a massive aesthetic backlash to polyester, and this can't be separated from the fabric's social position. From the 1980s, cotton growers ran a massive advertising campaign to raise its profile among wealthy Americans and re-establish the fiber as luxurious. The Official Preppy Handbook arrived at the same time with the guidance: "Wool, cotton, and the odd bits of silk and cashmere are the only acceptable materials for Prep clothes." The book's editor Lisa Birnbach warned that a "small percentage of polyester" can ruin a shirt, and pointed to the fraying collar of over-washed cotton shirt as a status symbol. By this point, the connotation of polyester was no longer “high-tech” but low-class. This class bias imbued polyester with a negative status value that made it ultimately look ugly. John Waters could conjure up an intense feeling of kitsch by just naming his film Polyester. 

Today manufacturers continue to use polyester-cotton blends to create “wrinkle-free” garments, but the stigmas remain. A “beautiful” shirt from a high-end brand comes in real cotton or linen, despite all the inefficiencies involved.

I rehash the rise and fall of polyester because I believe it presages what will happen to generative AI art. At the moment, computer scientists are creating software that reduces time-consuming inefficiencies in creating new designs, sounds, and other aesthetic products. Companies are already beginning to use AI-art in their advertising and product design, especially small businesses without design teams. Larger firms are planning to layoff employees or curb hiring in the belief that they can do more with GenAI.

While polyester took a few decades to lose its appeal, GenAI is already feeling a bit cheesy. We're only a few years into the AI Revolution, and Facebook and X are filled to the brim with “AI slop.” Everyone around the world has near-equal access to these tools, and low-skilled South and Southeast Asian content farmers are the most active creators because their wages are low enough for the platforms' economic incentives to be attractive.

Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.

Of course, GenAI is much worse for society than polyester. Synthetic fibers were bad for the environment, but so was the famously diabolical cotton industry. GenAI will first wreck the labor market for design professionals. But moreover, the tools are already being used to undermine the entire information structure of society in assisting the creation of disinformation that looks identical to reality. This, too, will damage its status value. Who wants to wear a T-shirt designed by the same software that powers the fake imagery used in authoritarian propaganda? 

There has always been an internal tension in the intellectual debate around “postmodernism.” Thinkers like Fredric Jameson or Jean Baudrillard theorized about the postmodern era as a warning about how contemporary media and economic structures degrade the human experience. At the same time, familiarity with these theorists became cultural capital, which made being pro-postmodernist into a high-status ideology. To be an optimist about the future meant embracing the emptiness. Superficiality was depth. Living in a simulation was far-out, man. About 20 years ago, Momus and I used to argue bitterly about this idea, but I agree with his point that Japan's brand as the world's most “postmodern nation” helped make it cool.

That being said, when you strip away all the theoretical jargon of postmodernism, its theorists were simply describing an extinction-level destruction of cultural value. Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a few people, but it’s absolutely devastating for the creation of deep meaning. This is the main conclusion of Status and Culture: artifacts and styles take on their full value within a social context, and less value is created when all cultural artifacts are procurable with enough money, can be made anywhere by anyone, and offer no useful social distinctions between philistine and aesthete. AI is simply the latest step in this long process of devaluation — auguring a future where the entire fabric of our lives, from top to bottom, becomes polyester.

But the historical rejection of polyester gives me hope. Humans ultimately are built to pursue value, and create it where it doesn’t exist. When small groups invent new sources of value, others notice and want in. The more that the economy embraces synthetic culture, the more we'll be primed for a revival of non-synthetic culture. But this is where you come in: We have to be ready to fully embrace this return of human-made art. Our generation's polyester salespeople are not deep thinkers and they don't care about the externalities of what they're doing. They’re here to sell us polyester. We don’t have to buy it, but more importantly, we don't have to feel bad about not buying it.