Rainie talked with TechCrunch about how AI models tend to produce similar images, including some that people find "unsettling."
Lee Rainie, director of Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, provided insight for a recent TechCrunch article examining why AI-generated restaurant menus can have an unnaturally polished, uniform appearance — and why people often recognize something is off.
The article explores how generative AI models can produce increasingly similar-looking content as they draw from existing material and optimize their outputs to be broadly appealing.
“The optimization of the data sets is for pleasingness, or you know, not being offensive, and so there’s a way that turns into homogenization,” Rainie told TechCrunch. “What AI is known to do both in images and language is to shave off the edges.”
Rainie also explained why consumers may react negatively to AI-generated imagery even when they cannot immediately identify what makes it different.
“People have an almost unexplainable sense about when they’re looking at something that’s AI-generated, compared with something that was real in the first place,” Rainie said. “There’s just a sensibility that people sometimes find hard to articulate, but they kind of know it when they see it and I think that’s one of the reasons why some of the early stories about the backlash [against restaurants using AI menus] is so pronounced.”