I cling to this Japanese idea with a dash of desperation and a whiff of cultural appropriation, but it resonates with my heart in a way that draws a crisp sharp line between generative slop and human creative output.

Wabisabi is, as I understand it, a valuing of beauty emerging from imperfection and the stories that are part of an object that has impermanence in the world. In other words, something grows in worth when it passes through hands, chips, cracks, is repaired, is broken and patched, and lives in and through the history of our hearts and hands.

It is the reason we take the “good plates” out when any old occasion strikes. It is why I don’t wrap my furniture in plastic. It is a reason to put stickers on your laptop. It is patching holes in a favourite sweater or replacing a broken zipper on a jacket even though the colour may not match. All these things add to the history and story of the object and make it more interesting. In the parlance of a world rife with AI slop, the authenticity of something grows with the life it lives.

To generate perfection from an algorithm is to give something a history that starts with no story… well, besides the weight of questions about the agent: who built it, who prompted it, who trained it, and what data was it trained on?

Whether we think about it routinely or not, many of us value the answers to these types of questions about many aspects of our life: Do you greet the barista at the cafe who made your coffee? Do you check the country of manufacture on a pair of socks or a new car? Do you read the bio of the artist who’s song you just downloaded? All of it is story that emerges from the bits of human imperfection of those things, no matter how industrial the process.

But now we’ve not only tried to remove the human but the story, and I’m not sure where that leaves authenticity—or where beauty can fill cracks that don’t exist.