Latent Beauty: AI Liberating Contextual / Universal Dogmas of Aesthetics

Latent beauty is not what you see. It is what could have been seen, had we not been conditioned otherwise. Or at least, that’s what I’ve started to wonder.

I don’t write this as an expert or a critic. I write it as someone caught between fascination and skepticism — someone who grew up surrounded by certain visual traditions, only to find himself constantly questioning them in the age of AI. What even is beauty today? Is it still rooted in history, or has it become a product of the algorithm?

For centuries, the rules of aesthetics have been shaped by context: religion, empire, education, ideology. We like to believe that beauty is subjective, but much of what we call beautiful is inherited — shaped by power, repeated until it feels like truth. From the golden ratio in architecture to symmetry in portraiture, we’ve sought order. But do we genuinely respond to this order, or have we simply been taught to?

There’s something strangely parallel between this and science. Einstein’s search for a Theory of Everything tried to bring unity to the universe — to explain all phenomena through a single, elegant framework. But beauty isn’t gravity. It doesn’t follow one law. It bends. It contradicts. It breaks its own rules. Still, we’ve tried to contain it.

We built institutions to legitimize. Platforms to replicate. Curricula to canonize. We flattened the world into mood boards, creating a visual culture that increasingly repeats itself. Is that what aesthetics have become — a feedback loop? A safe zone of recycled styles that we call trends?

Then came AI. Or rather, it’s been here — crawling through our archives, digesting our patterns, offering us mirrors we didn’t ask for. It learns from our preferences and then distorts them. But what happens when those distortions are more interesting than the source material? What if what we dismiss as "weird" is actually closer to the truth — or at least, a truth we’ve forgotten how to see?

Sometimes, the outputs are absurd. A woman dissolves into architecture. A skyline mimics embroidery. Faces blur into patterns that feel more like dreams than designs. Are these failures? Or are they a kind of visual rebellion — a rupture in what we’ve come to expect?

I keep thinking: maybe this is what latent beauty is. Not beauty hidden in the world, but beauty buried under consensus. And maybe AI, for all its problems, is helping us unbury it — or at least notice the cracks.

Of course, I’m still unsure. Can a machine help us see more clearly? Or is it just another system pushing us into new patterns, new dogmas disguised as freedom? Can generic outputs, as dull or repetitive as they sometimes are, actually teach us something about our own limits — about what we overlook, or what we settle for?

I don’t have an answer. But I keep returning to this thought: maybe the point isn’t to find the new standard of beauty. Maybe the point is to stop looking for standards altogether. Who am I, after all, to judge an Instagram post, whether it gets a million likes or none at all? Each piece of content reflects something in me, and in that sense, I become both a participant and an observer in this continuous feedback loop. It’s almost absurdly obvious that the masses are not just the audience but also the arbiters of what beauty means. In a world where everything can be beautiful, maybe nothing is truly beautiful—or perhaps, in a world where everything seems generic, there’s a hidden beauty in that very genericity. It’s a paradox, but it’s also a reminder that beauty is always evolving, always shifting with our perceptions. And maybe that’s the true liberation: that now we have the tools to create, and whether something is beautiful or not becomes a personal question, a personal quest.

By giving everyone the tools to express themselves, perhaps we’re on the cusp of formulating a new theory of beauty—one that is decentralized, one that exists with and without judgment, and one that is universal in the most decentralized way.

That, to me, is where something begins — not in the images themselves, but in the uncertainty they provoke. In the questions they ask without trying to answer. That is latent beauty: a space of possibility, and a reminder that unlearning is its own kind of vision.

To unlearn is to let go of the ingrained biases and traditional standards that have long shaped our perception of beauty. It means breaking free from old constraints and embracing the fluidity of new interpretations. Unlearning invites us to see the world with fresh eyes, to continuously question what we find beautiful and why. In essence, it’s a journey of continuous discovery, where beauty is not a fixed concept but an evolving experience. AI, then, becomes a tool for broadening our understanding, for embracing diverse forms and contexts, and for appreciating creations on their own terms. Perhaps, in this ever-changing landscape, we find not just new meanings of beauty, but a deeper acceptance of its many forms, and the freedom to see the world through a more inclusive and expansive lens.