The Aesthetic Boom Is Coming. It Won't Look Like AI.

Monolith

SubscribeSign in

The Aesthetic Boom Is Coming. It Won't Look Like AI.

Monolith<br>Jul 21, 2026

Share

In 1839 a machine learned to make perfect pictures, and painters responded with the greatest creative explosion in Western history.

When the daguerreotype was announced in 1839, the painter Paul Delaroche is said to have declared that from that day, painting was dead.

(Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, 1838. Public domain)<br>Freed from the job of accuracy because the job no longer paid, painting went looking for work the machine couldn't do, and found it in: light (Impressionism, named by a critic trying to insult it), feeling (Expressionism), structure (Cubism), and finally the departure from depiction altogether. Painting traveled further in the eighty years after the daguerreotype than in the four hundred before it. And notice the tell, because it will matter later: after photography, the visible brushstroke stopped being a flaw and started being the entire point. The moment a machine could make a perfect surface, the imperfect surface became the signature of a human hand, and its price went up.<br>The machine caused the boom; humans made it. Photography contributed its own beauty at the bottom, filling ordinary parlors with portraits of people who could never have hired a painter. All while its pressure detonated the top, forcing painters onto territory no machine could follow.

The boom you can already see

Round one is happening in bits, and you have probably noticed it without naming it.<br>For twenty years, the sameness of the internet was enforced by scarcity: real design was expensive, so everyone below a certain budget took the template, and the template was the gradient blob. Then it was bootstrap framework look. Then it was Wordpress popular templates. Then it was Framer. That constraint just quietly died.<br>With Claude and its rivals having dramatically upped their design game, a solo founder can now sit down after dinner and stand up a website by morning that would have cost a five-figure agency engagement in 2022. All with considered typography, coherent spacing, restraint, layout, and the hellscape that CSS is.<br>You could take the nihilistic argument: now everything boils down to taste, and with most people lacking taste, everything converges to the "AI" template. You know the tells: a purple gradient, Inter font, italic styled text in the hero section. But with each model iteration, we see AI losing its “templateness”.

Oliver ೫@oliverhamrin

Went to see Nolan's The Odyssey last night, and today I made these posters.

4:52 PM · Jul 19, 2026 · 222K Views

125 Replies · 1.19K Reposts · 9.67K Likes

(A tweet I randomly came across in my feed, showing a user making stunning posters for ‘The Odyssey’ using AI)

Atoms, yes, are a harder problem than bits. But it's a matter of 'when', not 'if'.<br>Here come Atoms

The physical world is already receiving its first deliveries. In Los Angeles, a company called Czinger builds a hypercar whose chassis was designed by generative algorithms and printed in metal.<br>And in a workshop in New York, the pointing machine has come back as a robot arm. The pointing machine, if you’ve never heard of it, is the nineteenth century’s best-kept open secret: Rodin rarely carved his own marbles. He worked in clay, and workshop carvers transferred his models into stone with a rig of needles and dials. Rodin supplied the taste. The carvers supplied the labor.<br>This is not a metaphor. You can watch a machine carving classical marble sculpture while human craftsmen wait to finish the surfaces by hand, exactly as Rodin’s carvers finished his. The company is called Monumental Labs, its stated mission is a “stone renaissance,” and its thesis is this: use robots and AI to crush the cost of carving stone, and ornament comes back to buildings. The stuff no developer has been able to afford since roughly the Hoover administration.

In defence of massification

Ok, now we have AI pioneering atoms. What’s the next argument? Well, there are a thousand essays mourning how plain everything has become, with mass production and capitalism to blame. There’s of course some truth to it. But when someone sighs over the homes of yore, the paneled rooms and turned banisters and furniture with presence, they are picturing a house that belonged to, at minimum, the top few percent of its century.<br>Judge by the median instead, and the standardized century starts to look like an aesthetic miracle. IKEA, the designated punchline of every essay about soulless sameness, put actually-designed objects, drawn by actual designers with defensible proportions, into hundreds of millions of homes that would historically have contained almost nothing designed whatsoever.<br>Now physical AI is set to collapse the cost of making things all over again, and this time flexibility rides along: the freedom to design objects of real ambition. With ornament,...