Essay · Mar 2026
Why decoration is the last thing we should hand to machines
From the DEEO conversation: art, AI, and the impulse to make a thing more beautiful than it needs to be.
Something Yianni said on episode 26 has been rattling around my head for two weeks. He was talking about the human impulse to decorate: to carve a handle into the shape of a fish, to paint the walls of a cave, to pick a strange font.
Decoration is not ornament. It is the evidence that a human was here.
AI is very good at average
The current generation of image and text models are statistically excellent. They produce outputs near the center of the distribution of everything they’ve seen. That is, by definition, the opposite of decoration. Decoration is idiosyncratic. It is a choice nobody else would have made.
The machine finds the center. The artist chooses the edge.
Use AI for the plumbing. Decorate the room yourself.
