AI induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation − it’s already happening
Ahmed Elgammal | The Conversation | 22nd January 2026
As AI-generated imagery expands, one possible outcome is “cultural stagnation”. AI systems naturally produce “compressed and generic” outputs. Training other systems on this material could result in images that favour “the familiar and the conventional”, leading to a loss of diversity in our visual environment. One might spot a silver lining here. The spread of slick AI imagery is feeding a new appreciation of the hand made, “lo-fi” imagery that contains the minor imperfections characteristic of humans.