A few weeks ago, I overheard some seasoned publishers observe: "It’s nice, but it looks… too AI." They were looking at some new advertising for a title.

Translation: the piece was not fooling anyone into believing it was a photograph. Somewhere in the uncanny swirl of colours or near-subliminal geometry, the eye detected the tell-tale signature of the machine. That signature was seen as a fault.

It made me think.

Civilisation has lived through this before. Every era births a new visual grammar that initially offends prevailing taste, only to become tomorrow’s mainstream. Sometimes this results from new techniques, sometimes from new technologies. The status quo in our aesthetic ecosystem is regularly disrupted, and before we habituate to its new parameters, we normally rail against them for a while. Re-acquainting ourselves with earlier artistic scandals can help us to see the so-called "AI aesthetic" not so much as a glitch but as the next chapter in the evolution of style.

Remember when “unfinished” was an insult? During 1874, in Paris, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and friends mounted the first Impressionist exhibition after being rejected by the Salon jury. Critics sneered that their canvases were mere "sketches", branded the movement with the dismissive slur "Impressionism" and complained about "unfinished or even sloppy" brushwork.

Vincent van Gogh was largely seen as a madman. He sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, "The Red Vineyard" (1888). Just linger on that (initial) meagre recognition. His abrasive textures, exaggerated colours and swirling skies scandalised his neighbours. Later, they defined post-Impressionism and, indeed, the gift-shop poster industry. My children’s bedrooms were festooned with prints of such works, as part of my effort to familiarise them with artistic talent.

Long before generative models, photography itself was denounced as art’s "mortal enemy". Poet Charles Baudelaire wanted the new medium banished to science textbooks. In 1913, critic Marius de Zayas thundered: "Photography is not Art. It is not even an art… (just) the plastic verification of a fact." But of course, without the technology of cameras and films, we would not have treasured Man Ray and his surrealist and avant-garde photography – nor Ansel Adams with his famously Straight Photography and Zone System that stylised "unnatural", high-contrast, sharply detailed black-and-white landscapes.

The auditory arts reveal the same pattern. When Igor Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring" premiered in 1913, it caused a riot in the concert hall. It was denounced as "barbaric" and "savage noise". Today, it is standard repertoire in symphony orchestras. What was first seen as cacophony is now a classic.

What if the bloom, the gloss, the dream-like morphologies are precisely the core DNA of our new aesthetic?

The electric guitar was initially dismissed as a gimmick. It was not acceptable as a "real" instrument for serious musicians. Early rock and roll was condemned as "the devil’s music". Electronic music pioneers like Kraftwerk were mocked for replacing "authentic" instruments with synthesisers. Each innovation first shocked, then normalised, then influenced everything that followed.

Remember the mockery of auto-tune? It evolved from a corrective production tool to a deliberate aesthetic choice that defined 2000s hip-hop and pop. What was once derided as "cheating" was then deliberately flaunted by Cher’s Believe (1998).

So what counts as "too AI"? Right now, generative images wear their origins on their sleeve: hyper-sharp fabrics, impossibly even lighting, cosmic depths-of-field, and other unfamiliar aesthetic markers. We instinctively try to sand these artefacts away to achieve photographic plausibility. In doing so, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past – judging a new medium by the criteria of an old one.

What if the bloom, the gloss, the dream-like morphologies are precisely the core DNA of our new aesthetic – and give, for example, a book advertisement those crucial three seconds of stop-time on a scrolling phone screen? What if they express emotions in new ways, produce psychological hooks that arrest attention and instigate engagement, in a way not previously experienced? What if, for example, they bring an author’s work to life and gain attention in a way previously unimagined? Spoiler alert: I know for a fact that they do exactly these things. Data from "AI-aestheticed" advertising shows it attracts at least six times more reader attention than previous benchmarks, and more than 12 times conversion to e-commerce interaction.

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