Tomato Revelations: Better Curation with AI
Instead of managing massive amounts of data, information, or selecting the "best" content, true curation is about unlocking the full reality and essence of whatever is in front of you. AI can help.
1. The Green Tomato Book
"Where are the other books?"
I blinked, scanning the small, sparse room again.
All I saw was a book on growing tomatoes. I like to eat them but there’s no way I’d ever care about growing them.
The old shopkeeper's eyebrows arched. "Other books?"
"Yeah, you know... other titles? Options?" I gestured vaguely around the room.
He chuckled. "You're looking at it."
I looked at the small stack of the same book on the table.
"You mean...?"
"One book. That's all we sell here."
I’ve seen my fair share of pop-up stores but this was something else. No store name out front. Just a single room off the street, in a small building, crammed between a luxury clothing brand and a supermarket.
"But how do you stay in business?" I asked.
"We sell the right book to the right person at the right time. Nothing more, nothing less."
I stared at the green leather cover.
"And this is...?"
"Your next book," he said simply. "If you choose to read it."
My hand hovered over the green book. The shop seemed to hold its breath.
The inspiration for the book shop I found myself in is Morioka Shoten, “a single room with a single book” store, in Tokyo. It sells only one book. More precisely, it sells multiple copies of one title that changes weekly, with a small book-inspired art exhibition. It has spawned a network of similar book stores all around the world.
If you ever wanted a good example of curation in the Age of AI, this is it. And it’s different from how we typically think about, and do, curation.
We’re going from using data to curate markets to find one thing, to bringing relevance to any thing with data (and AI).
Let me show you what I mean.
2. How Amazon Curates What You Buy (And Don’t Buy)
Today we think of Amazon as an algorithm that gives you accurate suggestions on what to buy next. But in 1997, Amazon had a strong human editorial voice with site editors, who were posting reviews and providing recommendations.
Many of these editors had a literary background, wrote hundreds of reviews based on their own taste, and edited the home page where millions were influenced by their thumbs up or thumbs down. The goal was to give Amazon an indie bookshop feel, and their curation could make or break books.
But pretty quickly, Amazon moved to a mass curational model, with a technique called collaborative filtering. It shifted focus from personal editor reviews to discovering correlations between products. The goal was simple: match customers like me with others who had similar purchase histories and show me what to buy next.
This eventually turned into item-to-item collaborative filtering. Instead of matching customers, this approach focused on finding connections between products. The human connection was either gone or buried inside algorithms, if it existed at all. If you just compared product correlations, and if you had a large enough dataset, the system could suggest the next thing to buy with uncanny accuracy.
In a handful of moves, Amazon went from human curated recommendations to hyper-tailored pattern matching.
We went from “you can learn to love this, because another human with a more refined taste is recommending it” to more of a “we know what you will love, buy this next thing”. Within Amazon the process was known as personalization, which is an odd term since there’s not much of a person involved.
However, as clever as this system is, it isn’t without flaws. Crucially, the system can’t understand why an item or a book is desirable, and as a result, it can only promote consumption. This does make sense for Amazon. The whole purpose of that business is, after all, to sell stuff forever.
Compare this with the one single book store. The store is about you falling in love with the single object you’re presented with. Amazon is about using big data, big algorithms, and big machine learning models to find the perfect next thing for you to buy, out of millions.
The Amazon-based model of curation has quickly become the de facto standard for just about all platforms, from commerce to social. Pretending to be human oriented, what makes us human is conspicuously absent. For better or worse, everything is based on complex algorithms and machine learning.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the Age of AI, is it what we need? No, it’s not.
In the Age of AI, curation is not about finding you the perfect next thing to buy or look at. Instead, it’s about a fuller experience with whatever is in front of you.
Instead of optimizing for purchases, you could use AI for discovery and a true encounter with the reality of an object. The experience becomes one of sense-making and meaning-making.
Amazon's great at suggesting products we might buy. But I'm more interested in how AI could act as a curator—while helping us practice the skill of curation.
3. Meanwhile, Inside the Bookstore…
Back in that book store, I picked up the book with the green leather binding and it rested easily in my hands.
I've never cared about tomatoes beyond their flavor and texture on a cheeseburger with extra bacon, a fried egg, banana, and avocado on the side.
This book was about growing tomatoes. I flipped the book open to about the middle and looked up, suddenly aware of my surroundings.
Every surface, every corner in the store was dedicated to tomatoes. A series of watercolor paintings hung on the walls, showcasing the vivid reds, yellows, and greens of tomato varieties. Glass cases displayed soil samples, labeled with their mineral content and pH levels.
My eyes were drawn to a series of paintings and drawings on the far wall. I wandered over, the book still in my hand.
The first was a detailed pencil sketch of a tomato plant, its structure meticulously rendered. Next to it hung a vibrant watercolor painting of a sliced tomato, its seeds and gel-like interior captured with surprising beauty.
But it was the third piece that truly caught my attention—an oil painting of a sun-drenched tomato field. The artist had managed to capture the play of light on the leaves, the heavy droop of tomato-laden vines. I could feel the warmth of the sun and smell the soil and plants.
The shopkeeper appeared beside me. "The artist spent a whole growing season on a tomato farm to create these. She wanted to capture not just the look, but the feeling of being there."
He gestured towards a nearby table. "Take a look at these."
On the table sat a row of clear jars, each containing a tomato plant at different stages of growth. From a tiny sprout to a mature plant heavy with fruit, it was like a time-lapse sequence frozen in glass.
"I've never really thought about how tomatoes grow," I admitted.
"Most people don't. But once you start, it's fascinating. Did you know that tomato plants can communicate with each other?"
"What? How?" I found myself asking, surprised by my own curiosity.
He pointed to a diagram on the wall. "They release certain chemicals into the soil when they're under attack by pests. Nearby plants pick up on these signals and start producing their own pest-resistant compounds."
I moved closer to examine the diagram, the book still in my hands. As I did, I noticed a tray of soil with several varieties of tomato seedlings. Each was labeled with its name and characteristics.
"Feel free to touch them," the shopkeeper encouraged. "Gently, of course."
4. How To Scale Curation (And Tomatoes)
Right there and then, as I was focused on the soil and seeds, trays and branches, I found myself intrigued.
Something that I didn’t care at all about before (tomatoes and growing them), was opened up to me in a new way. I’ve picked them up, placed them in a plastic bag, and bought them at a grocery store more times than I can count. I’ve eaten them in salads, on burgers, and with a thich, generous slice of mozzarella.
But now, I encountered them on their own terms—I could touch, smell, and take them in as they were, without them playing a supporting role in food. They became more real to me.
I could see a new form of curation that would work in the Age of AI.
Instead of volume and matchmaking, through algorithms and machines—it’s one, green book on growing tomatoes.
Imagine if every object you come across could be imbued with relevance? If everything you encounter could be made more meaningful? This is what AI could help us do, if used properly.
It’s about truly encountering whatever is in front of you, the realness of anything, on its own terms.
Curation that facilitates this, is the kind of curation that will matter in the Age of AI. This is the next frontier in the ever-evolving pursuit of what being human is. And now it can be done at scale.
What I mean is this: In the same way that search is for finding, curation is for discovery.
When I first started practicing curation, I saw it as a process of filtering and arranging information. But the more I curate, the more I realize it goes beyond selection and arrangement—it’s translation.
A translator transforms ideas, capturing nuances and cultural context to make the original meaning clear in a new form. One of the most powerful forms of this curation-as-translation is vernacular transformation.
Imagine trying to understand World War I, but all the history books seem dry and disconnected from your life. Now picture an AI system that could explain the entire conflict using Fortnite as a metaphor. Suddenly, complex alliances become squad formations, trench warfare translates to building defensive structures, and the impact of new technologies mirrors the effects of rare weapons in the game. That's curation as translation.
When you curate, you’re not just picking out the "best" pieces of information. You’re transforming that information into something new—something that speaks to your audience in a way they can truly understand and connect with.
5. The New Form of Curation in the Age of AI
First, you'd need to 'teach' the AI about yourself in a comprehensive way. It's like creating a digital twin of your mind—your interests, knowledge base, thinking patterns, and even your quirks. This isn't just about listing preferences, however—it's about modeling your intellectual DNA.
What if we could curate not just from what exists, but from what's possible? Instead of showing the same tomato gallery to everyone, what if it constructed a gallery custom to you?
The Cabinet of Wonder
Turns out you can, if we go back in time and look at so-called 'cabinet of wonders', or 'Wunderkammer'. These originated in Renaissance Europe and were rooms filled with diverse collections of objects—natural specimens, works of art, and curiosities from around the world.
The bizarre and extraordinary reigned supreme. Rudolf II's Kunstkammer in Prague housed the ominous Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil's Bible, alongside a whimsical mechanical golden ship.
Ole Worm's Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen proudly displayed a stuffed crocodile suspended from the ceiling, a visual shock to 17th-century Danish visitors. The Tradescant Collection in London boasted one of the few existing dodo remains of the time, as well as a cherry stone intricately carved with 20 faces.
In Florence, Francesco I de' Medici's Studiolo concealed secret cabinets behind elaborate frescoes, each hiding exotic curiosities and precious oddities. Perhaps most unusually, Archduke Ferdinand II's collection at Ambras Castle featured a macabre gallery of portraits depicting people with deformities, alongside a revered suit of armor belonging to Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero.
These collections blurred the lines between natural history, art, and the occult, offering a glimpse into a world where the strange and wonderful were cherished and displayed with equal reverence. People could see, touch, and often smell pieces of a different world taking shape in front of them.
Curation becomes a transformative act. We're not just selecting and arranging—we're interpreting and revealing. And what if you could use big data to get the most out of any object you’re given?
Imagine holding an unremarkable stone in your hand. As you turn it over, your AI-enhanced glasses spring to life, overlaying the stone with information and storytelling. The AI, drawing from databases of geological, historical, and cultural knowledge, begins to weave a narrative uniquely tailored to you. It notices the stone's subtle glint and, knowing your interest in astronomy, tells you about the cosmic origins of its minerals, born in the heart of a long-dead star. The AI then seamlessly connects this to your recent travels, explaining how similar stones were used in ancient rituals at a site you visited last summer.
As you listen, the stone in your hand transforms. It's no longer a pebble. It's an object of value, unique on its own, a time capsule, a connection between your personal experiences and the expanse of human knowledge.
The AI curator also suggests creative ways you might incorporate the stone into your hobby of landscape painting, showing a projection of how its textures could add depth to your next piece.
You’re creating new ways of experiencing reality, helping people see the true nature of things they might have missed. That is, you and I can experience the true reality, the real essence, of an object, person, or situation—whatever is in front of us. This is curation.
What An AI Wunderkammer Looks Like
I've created an AI system that acts as a curator and helps us practice the skill of curation.
To do this, I had to rethink my approach to AI and information processing. This system wouldn't just be about selection or arrangement of information, but about creating a digital 'cabinet of wonders'.
It begins with a question: What—of everything you’ve watched, read, and heard—has captured your attention and imagination? Beauty, perhaps. Fractals and chaos theory. Persuasion and influence. Bioluminescent algae and tigers. Florence and The Grand Canyon. Networks and nodes. Aristotle, Mandelbrot, da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Jung—the list of people, places, ideas, and things is an endless scroll.
With this understanding, the AI helps you make sense of what’s in front of you, then translates whatever that is into a form that allows you to experience its true reality, much like carefully arranged objects in a cabinet of wonders.
But it's not about taking in a lot of information—this system would help you practice the art of curation yourself. It would teach you how to select, arrange, and present information in ways that reveal its true essence to others, just as the curators of historical cabinets of wonders did.
An AI curation system would incorporate a feedback mechanism, similar to reinforcement learning in large language models. As you curate your digital cabinet of wonders, it would help you refine your skills, guiding you to create experiences that are not just personally meaningful, but relevant and impactful for others. It would encourage constant exploration and confrontation with new ideas, helping you escape the taste traps set by conventional algorithms and continually expand your collection.
This AI system wouldn't replace your own thinking or creativity. Instead, it would be a collaborative tool, constantly learning from your interactions and feedback.
By reimagining curation as the creation and sharing of digital cabinets of wonders, you're creating a new way to interact with knowledge. It's not just to know more or understand more deeply, but to truly experience the essence of reality and share that experience with others.
This approach to curation has the potential to influence others, bridging gaps between fields, cultures, and individual perspectives, much like how the historical cabinets of wonders sparked curiosity and cross-pollination of ideas.
In this way, you're not just a consumer of information, but a facilitator of wonder, using AI to help you curate experiences that reveal the true nature of our world.
Curation used to be about selection and arrangement. You curated to remember things you cared about, or to communicate an idea, and to remember.
In the old world, curation shapes your taste. But in the Age of AI, curation shapes your perception.
Curation is about finding the right object, but translation is about unlocking any object—so you can experience the full reality of whatever is in front of you.
6. Growing & Curating Tomatoes
Back in the bookstore, I put down the green book, and ran my fingers over the delicate tomato leaves. They were softer than I expected, almost velvety. The earthy smell reminded me of my grandmother's garden.
"You know," I said, picking up the book again, "I never thought I'd be interested in growing tomatoes. But this is actually pretty cool."
The shopkeeper nodded. I caught a glimpse of a smirk but it vanished quickly.
I flipped through more pages, noticing how the book's descriptions matched the exhibits around the room. It was as if the entire store was an extension of the book, bringing it to life.
"I think I'll buy this," I said, surprising myself. "Maybe I'll try growing some tomatoes of my own."
As he rang up my purchase, in the few minutes I spent in that store, I'd experienced more than just a book sale.
I'd been given a glimpse into the fascinating reality of something I'd always taken for granted.
Talk again soon,
Samuel Woods
The Bionic Writer