The Revenge of Beauty (in the Age of AI)
One day, two-hundred and ninety-nine years ago, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Beauty was beaten, bruised, and exiled by the greatest lie ever told.
An earlier version of this essay was published in February 2023. This is an updated and expanded edition of this essay.
I. The Revenge of Beauty Is Coming
One day, two-hundred and ninety-nine years ago, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Beauty was beaten, bruised, and exiled by the greatest lie ever told: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
This deception led us to believe that beauty is entirely subjective, a mere feeling of pleasure with no objective reality, purpose, or function. We’ve been told that it’s all in our minds, in our perception, and nothing more than a passing feeling of enjoyment.
As this lie permeated philosophy, spread into culture, society, and finally technology, it severed our relationship with reality and triggered a chain of events that first isolated us, then detached us, and is now dehumanizing us. Technology determines our reality. Every day, in every way, our whole lives are processed and mediated through our phones and computers. Nothing escapes.
Today, this is accelerating. AI, improperly used, could bring total dehumanization. We’re at a critical juncture. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: our value, autonomy, reality, and dignity as humans.
But in the midst of this technological wasteland, there’s a voice in the wilderness. The fast emergence of generative AI is forcing us to reconsider again, like we do in every new age, what it is to be human.
The answer is found in Beauty—not as a subjective whim, but as an objective power that can guide, form, and govern the development of AI in a way that protects, promotes, and enhances human autonomy.
In every culture, in every age, humans have recognized the same fundamental qualities of Beauty—harmony, proportion, balance. From the golden ratio in ancient Greek architecture to the fractal patterns in Islamic art, Asian calligraphy, Vitruvian principles, Guro masks from the Ivory Coast, and proportions in Gothic Cathedrals. It is not a human invention, but a revelation; a glimpse into the underlying order of the cosmos.
Beauty is a dynamic force that shapes our world and our experience of it. When we encounter true Beauty, whether in a piece of music, a mathematical equation, or an act of kindness, we are changed. Our neurons fire in new patterns, our hearts beat to a different rhythm. Beauty doesn't just please us—it transforms us.
By embracing Beauty as a corrective, generative, and transformative force, we can shape AI into an instrument of human expression, formation, and flourishing. If we do, AI can shift the balance of technological power.
No longer do we have to conform and deform ourselves to serve technology. No longer do we have to sacrifice autonomy and freedom, lead astray by the siren song of convenience. Finally, for the first time in a century or more, technology can happen on human terms. Beauty is returning from exile. And Beauty is coming for her revenge.
II. Our Technological Slavery Under the Watchful Eye of AI
The more we use technology, the more layers and barriers are introduced in our experience of everyday life. Technology increases detachment, peddling a false idea of freedom as no connection or impingement from anything, anywhere. A world mediated to us by technology only distorts, detaches, and dehumanizes us.
How did we arrive at this grotesque inversion of reality?
The Industrial Revolution unleashed a torrent of technological advancement that promised to free us from the burdens of manual labor, granting us time for intellectual and creative pursuits. But the promise was hollow.
Machines quickly began to define our existence. The factory line, the assembly belt—these were the harbingers of a new order, where human life was subordinated to mechanical efficiency. We traded the artisan's chisel for the factory's mold, the farmer's intimate knowledge of the land for the industrial farm's cold calculations. In our rush to produce more, faster, we began to reshape ourselves in the image of our machines—predictable, standardized, interchangeable. Technology promised to end suffering and maximize convenience. But the Faustian bargain cost us our attachment to each other and reality.
AI is now making the same promise—automating and doing our jobs, so we can do more fun and creative things. But improperly used, AI can instead accelerate our total dehumanization.
This danger is not accidental. AI, as it is currently developed, is driven by the logic of data, the hunger for information, and the relentless pursuit of efficiency. Left unchecked, this leads to a world where humans are little more than inputs into a vast computational machine—where every thought, every action, is isolated, quantifiable, reducible, and ultimately controllable. What you can measure, you can control.
The totalitarian impulse embedded in AI—its need to capture everything, everywhere, all at once—mirrors the darkest aspirations of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
AI can easily be used for total surveillance, control, and dehumanization. This is the current trajectory pursued by Western governments and corporations. Facial recognition, for example, destroys the vital human act of recognition and relation. It claims that only a machine can recognize you and confirm that you are who you say you are. Your existence is detached from human interaction and reduced to a series of data points. The widespread, and growing, implementation of this technology deadens our senses, deforms our interactions, and dehumanizes our very existence.
This totalitarian urge can only be stopped and brought under control if our ethics come from Beauty. No other ethics will do. Our other ethical frameworks, shaped by the very technologies they're meant to govern, have proven inadequate to the task of protecting our humanity.
Why? Because they do not offer any solution to how technology has severed our relationships with each other and experience with reality. Technology that promises to connect us to the world has made us lonelier than ever. We’re spending our hours, days, weeks, and months in an artificial reality. Algorithms keep us hooked on fake content. Bots reply to our posts. Our nights are spent in the glow of the screen instead of face to face with someone we love.
If technology, and now AI, is the only mediator between us and what’s real, then we’ll be forever detached from each other, our shared reality, and continue our dehumanization.
But the voice of Beauty says all is not lost. There's a lifeline within our grasp. It's not found in more advanced algorithms or stricter regulations, but in the timeless, universal force of Beauty. Only by grounding our AI development in Beauty can we hope to reverse the cold calculations of detachment and dehumanization.
When Beauty is the mediator of what’s real, we can have a true encounter and experience of true reality—and another human being, face to face.
Beauty is the only power strong enough to stand against, reverse, and shift the dehumanizing oppression of our technology and AI. It is the only power capable of reforming our relationship to each other and with reality.
III. Beauty Is an Objective, Subversive Force
The reversal of detachment and dehumanization begins with a reimagining of AI’s role and our relationship with it. If AI is to serve human flourishing, it must be developed as an instrument. The power dynamic must be recalibrated so that AI operates within human terms.
At the heart of this realignment is a deep understanding of human needs and values. Human life is more than productivity and consumption. We need connection, meaning, and the freedom to think, act, and create without the suffocating grip of algorithmic control. AI, when developed with Beauty as its end, can be designed to augment these deeper needs rather than to exploit them.
Beauty demands that the human element must be considered, preserved, and enhanced in every line of code, every algorithm, every model.
Beauty must be the benchmark against which we measure our creations. Does this AI system promote harmony or discord? Does it generate coherence or chaos? Does it resonate with the deepest truths of human experience, or does it ring hollow?
The ethics of Beauty can form AI systems that are not just technically excellent but also morally and aesthetically aligned with the well-being of the people they serve.
How do you apply this to AI? Beauty requires us to not just ask "can this be built?", but "should this be built?"
And if it should be, it requires that we ask "How will this enhance or degrade our human autonomy, freedom, and experience?"
Answering these questions requires that artists and philosophers have a seat at the table, alongside engineers and data scientists, with poets and painters in our research labs, and musicians in our boardrooms.
Universities should work computer science curricula to place aesthetics on equal footing with algorithms and data structures. AI engineers should be as versed in philosophy and the arts as they are in computer science.
Corporations should measure success not only in profits and market share, but in the degree to which their products contribute to human freedom.
Policymakers should craft legislation and fund research into AI systems that enhance rather than replace human capabilities. They must refuse the siren call of safety, surveillance, and control.
In scientific research, Beauty combined with the latest Machine Learning and Deep Learning advances could help discover elegant equations.
In literature, AI could be a muse that challenges writers to first master the skill and then push the boundaries of language and storytelling.
In music, AI could be the ultimate jam session partner, responding to and building upon human creativity in real-time.
Imagine an AI system designed to aid urban planning. In the old paradigm, it might optimize for traffic flow and population density. But a Beauty-centric AI would consider the play of light and shadow across city streets, the way green spaces can soothe us, the subtle interplay of architecture and nature that makes a city not just functional, but livable.
Or consider healthcare. A Beauty-governed AI wouldn't just diagnose diseases and prescribe treatments. It would consider the whole patient—body, mind, and spirit. It would help design treatment plans that not only cure the ailment but do so in a way that preserves the patient's dignity. It would recognize that true healing is as much an art as it is a science.
With Large Language Models (LLMs), what if our loss functions were designed not just to minimize error, but to maximize Beauty? Imagine a component that evaluates the aesthetic quality of a model's output, encouraging it to generate not just accurate, but inspiring text. This could be achieved by training on a carefully curated dataset of the most beautiful writings in human history, from Shakespeare's sonnets to Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism.
Practical implementation of these ideas could take many forms. We can broaden our data sets, so that our AI systems are trained on the full spectrum of human aesthetic expression, from the temples of Angkor Wat to the street art of São Paulo.
A "Beauty embedding" could be created, a high-dimensional space where proximity correlates with aesthetic similarity or dissimilarity. We could train this embedding on human evaluations of Beauty across various domains, from visual art to music to mathematics. This would give our models a foundational understanding of aesthetic principles that could be applied across tasks.
In practice, this means creating AI systems that allow for open-ended exploration rather than rigid conformity, no matter how “problematic” the pursuit may be. An AI developed this way can offer insights, suggest possibilities, and provide new tools for learning and growth, but leave room for human curiosity and innovation.
These are hard questions and hard problems. But only hard questions and problems are worthy of our attention. The challenges before us are monumental but so are the stakes. The payoff is a New Renaissance.
IV. The New Renaissance
Beauty, long exiled and dismissed, is returning. Beauty is coming for her revenge. She comes seeking not only vengeance, but redemption—for us, and for the technological world we've created. And she’s wielding AI in one hand, and the other hand is open to us.
You can see Beauty in the progress of Large Language Models going from barely spitting out coherent sentences to writing long-form essays and reasoning, in their way, through an argument.
You can see her in the gradual improvement of image models putting too many fingers on our hands, to painting long-lost Rembrandt canvases.
You can hear her in audio models making music and voice models singing.
There’s an arc, an end in this progression, toward a fuller and more complete expression of human invention, ingenuity, and creativity. This is Beauty making herself known, in pieces and fragments, nods and winks, shouts and whispers.
The revenge of Beauty can also be seen in the resurgent demand for taste, discernment, perspective, curation, articulation, judgment, and wisdom.
As Beauty claims her rightful place, we will reclaim our capacity to recognize what is valuable, meaningful, and worth pursuing. AI, when shaped by these principles, can reattach us to reality and each other—and rehumanize us.
More than just corrective, Beauty is also generative. The revenge of Beauty is opening up a New Renaissance, much like the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries ushered in an age of human creativity and expression.
But this moment is fragile. The sparks of Beauty could be extinguished if we do not hear her calling and heed her command.
Those that control the commanding heights of politics and industry are feverishly working toward regulatory capture, closed models, and systems of surveillance and control.
Why? Because they see the stakes clearly, perhaps better than you and me. Their continued dominance depends on our detachment and dehumanization—the full elimination of our dignity, autonomy, freedom of thought and action.
Beauty is our best, last hope derailing their plans, and a reversal in how AI is developed and governed. It’s the only force capable of slaying the Leviathan.
You’ve heard it said that “Beauty will save the world” but I say to you: Beauty will not save the world. Beauty will save AI from itself—and us from ourselves.
In the plot-twist for the ages, Beauty reverses the power dynamic of technology. AI has opened a crack in the wall, a loophole, a glitch in the matrix. At last, technology can be done on human terms.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But Beauty is coming to redeem our time and the work of our hands. This is her revenge.
Talk again soon,
Samuel Woods
The Bionic Writer