Generative AI, Everyday Aesthetic Production, and the Imperial Mode of Living

Abstract It is becoming increasingly clear that generative AI technologies come with significant environmental costs. Regardless, commercial generative AI services suggest they will facilitate a form of everyday life in which individual users can produce aesthetic content without limits. This mode of everyday aesthetic production is sold to users through fantasies of frictionlessness and immediacy that simultaneously sanitize and expand generative AI's environmental impact. This essay argues that commercial generative AI services thereby solidify what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen call the “imperial mode of living,” in which consumerist comforts are directly sustained by environmental destruction and extractivism. Moreover, the essay suggests that the forms of everyday aesthetic production that generative AI services encourage surreptitiously increase what Bernard Stiegler calls “informational entropy,” describing a dependency on technological infrastructures and processes of aesthetic homogenization that entrench and thus make it more difficult to challenge AI's imperial tendencies.