Design has always evolved alongside and through its tools. From Photoshop to web templates, each technological leap reshaped how we create and challenged what originality meant.
AI marks the next inflexion point. It has been creeping in for years through features like Content-Aware Fill and pattern generators. But generative AI goes further by simulating creativity. Assets appear in minutes, ideas take form at scale, and the process feels limitless. Anyone could suddenly create. And everyone did.
A new opportunity for distinction.
As our feeds filled with AI images, a new challenge surfaced: lack of distinction. Because when trained on the same data, AI produces the same tropes.
Scroll through any Pinterest board or Behance feed, and the blur is unmistakable. Same tools, same visual styles. With AI image-generation now mainstream, ideas have started to merge into one shared aesthetic. Sleek, seamless, and strangely hollow.
But as with every creative era before, when aesthetics collapse into sameness, they create the perfect conditions for distinction. Uniformity always breeds rebellion. And for those willing to go against the grain, that rebellion breeds opportunity.
Breaking the AI mould.
The rise of the “AI aesthetic” has triggered a creative counter-movement, one that uses the very technology that caused the blur to challenge it. When wielded as a tool, AI can become a medium for distinction, not imitation. With intent, direction and human sensibility, it can cut through the noise to create work that feels fresh and expressive.
As we noted in WAVE 01, lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, and FMCG brands are often first to experiment with AI-generated visuals. Their cultural currency depends on constant reinvention. In this edition, we’re spotlighting how those same creative shifts could translate into more specialist, enterprise-level sectors. The spaces where visual distinction is directly tied to credibility and trust.
In WAVE 02, we explore the trends that break the mould, with insights from Dusted’s very own designers who use AI as part of their toolkit. Here’s what we observed and how it could impact the next era of brand expression.
Imperfection & the poetics of error.
Over-polished hyper-realism has become one of the most recognisable hallmarks of the AI aesthetic. Portraits with impossibly perfect skin, symmetrical features and vacant gazes. Flawless to the point of sterility.
These artificial people are sometimes used as AI avatars. Virtually fabricated influencers who, according to The Financial Times, are threatening to cannibalise the income of real influencers. Mia Zelu, who “attended” Wimbledon 2025, is a prime example. Thousands mistook her for real despite the AI disclosure, a reflection, as Getty’s Asia-Pacific Head of Creative Kate Rourke noted, of how conditioned our eyes have become to this hyper-polished aesthetic online.
These overly polished AI avatars are now trying to sneak into the world of film. Recently, synthetic actress Tilly Norwood has attracted a wave of negative attention after its creators said they’re approaching talent agencies, with high-profile actors calling it "Deeply misguided & totally disturbed."
(Images of AI influencer Mia Zelu, as though attending Wimbledon.)
That’s why many artists and designers are now pushing back. To counter this eerie sameness, they’re using AI to explore imperfection.
They play into what’s known as “the poetics of error”, intentionally prompting AI to misfire to generate unexpected visual artefacts like pixelation, distortion or warped geometry. The result is art that celebrates what machines usually hide, like irregularity and visually intriguing malformations.
(Header image of this Red-Eye article. Author unspecified.)
Instituto Marangoni calls imperfection “the new code of desire”. A rejection of seamless digital sterility. Much like the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi, it recognises beauty in the incomplete and the asymmetrical.
Artists like Candace Arroyo are using AI to achieve this effect, creating compelling editorial models with textured skin and striking unconventional features.
(Candace Arroyo, Skincare Social Filler Pack - AI Fashion & Beauty.)
Other artists, like Sy Goldstein and Dietmar Höpfl, have taken this to the extreme, showing how the pendulum has swung in the complete opposite direction to the flawlessness of AI-rendered portraits.
(Hyper-realistic street photography style portraits by Sy Goldstein, created using Midjourney. Original post here.)
In the world of interior design, Philippe Starck designed an AI Chair for Kartell. Co-created with Autodesk’s generative design software, it’s functional in structure yet irregular in aesthetic. A balance between human precision and the unpredictability of the AI model.
(Product image of The AI Chair by Philippe Starck for Kartell, listed on Heal’s.)
In FMCG, Dove’s “Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era” campaign took the same idea into mass culture. Using AI to retrain Pinterest’s algorithm, the brand shifted search results away from homogenised beauty and toward real, diverse faces. Wrinkles, freckles and scars became symbols of authenticity. This campaign won the Grand Prix in Media at Cannes Lions 2025, proof that imperfection can drive relevance at scale.
For enterprise brands in B2B spaces, imperfection carries a different kind of weight. It’s not about visible flaws, but about showing humanity within precision. In regulated, data-driven sectors, subtle gestures – looser illustration styles, real photography, a touch of warmth in colour or language – can make technology feel approachable again. It softens the edges of systems that risk becoming overly slick and mechanical.
You can see this tension play out in the automotive world, where CGI has become a storytelling language of its own – hyper-real, yet striving for authenticity. Light, texture and reflection are used not to simulate perfection, but to ground the unreal in something human. At its best, this balance mirrors the industry’s broader design shift. Mechanical precision infused with emotion.
In an age defined by automation and polish, unpredictability stands out. Because perfection may impress, but imperfection connects.
Surrealism. From random to relevant.
AI has given us the means to push the boundaries of what’s possible. And surrealism, as a movement that allows us to stretch our imagination, has become the natural playground for it.
Fever-dream surrealism is another defining feature of the “AI aesthetic”, often through what’s now widely referred to as AI slop, or the uncanny, over-saturated imagery that has been polluting social feeds for the past three years, from cats in space helmets, Jesus made out of shrimps or impossible bread sculptures posted by bot accounts and garnering millions of likes.
(Example of AI slop from this Forbes article.)
Often nonsensical, sometimes mesmerising, AI slop has given rise to a new wave of low-cost “what if” experimentation. But it’s also blurred the line between the imagined and the real, impacting people’s perception of reality.
Indeed, AI has made surrealism newly accessible. But within the same visual vocabulary that has given us shrimp Jesus, we’re also seeing some of the most imaginative, culturally resonant work of the AI era.
In David Szauder’s Bestiarium, surrealism becomes an act of mythmaking. His AI-generated creatures – human–animal hybrids inspired by vintage portraiture – exist somewhere between dream and memory. Draped in early-20th-century silhouettes and muted palettes, they blend nostalgia with unease, charm with dissonance.
(Deep beauty by David Szauder, part of the Bestiarium series.)
Like all his AI art, Bestiarium carries a deep sense of tactility through textile materials you can almost feel. In his series Anatomy Sweaters, Szauder depicts embroidered sweaters revealing human organs in thread — hearts, lungs, veins — turning anatomy into ornament.
(Anatomy Sweaters by Davis Szauder.)
On his website, he said about his use of AI:
Thanks to AI, I now have a level of creative freedom that wasn’t possible before. The final images are no longer pixelated, and I can refine the renderings until they fully meet my vision.
David Szauder, AI Artist
In the commercial realm, Kalshi’s 2025 NBA Finals ad turned chaos into commentary, splicing together floating farmers, beer-swigging aliens and flag-draped cowboys – a visual metaphor for volatility and unpredictability, matching their “trade the madness” brand ethos. This surrealism was strategic. A deliberate reflection of a world teetering between the real and the synthetic.
BODYARMOR’s “Field of Fake” took the opposite approach. In its Super Bowl spot, AI-rendered faces melted, limbs warped and bodies fused with product packaging. Digital absurdity that framed the brand’s “no artificial ingredients” message with visceral clarity. Once the visual overload broke, the scene cut to real athletes and authentic motion.
This kind of surrealism, when handled with creative precision, can transform randomness into relevance. In data-heavy enterprise sectors like fintech or IoT, surrealism can unlock more than aesthetic novelty. It can visualise complexity, make abstract systems compelling through creativity. From illustrating unseen data flows to giving form to innovation itself, surrealism can be a design language for storytelling.
Nostalgia for a reimagined past.
Nostalgia has become one of the most distinctive creative responses to AI’s aesthetic dominance. As AI-generated imagery floods our feeds with glossy, frictionless imagery, designers and artists are turning to the past to reintroduce depth, emotion and cultural specificity, proving that machine-generated doesn’t have to mean soulless. When directed with vision, AI can recreate the tactility, imperfection and emotional resonance of another era.
Japanese artist Emi Kusano’s Office Ladies series captures this balance perfectly. Trained on Kusano’s own likeness, her AI models reconstruct the look and feel of 1960s–80s Japanese office life.
(Office Ladies by Emi Kusano.)
But beneath the surface polish lies critique. The figures, cloned and emotionless, re-enact the archetype of the Japanese “office lady”, reflecting both nostalgia for an analogue past and unease with modern automation. Instead of simulation for its own sake, this is a reflection through reconstruction. The past, reimagined to comment on the present.
The same friction between familiarity and fantasy drives Noelle van Dijk’s The Glitter Coven, part of her Faux Films series, an imaginative AI series of non-existent cult movies. This speculative cinematic world feels unmistakably 1970s. Velvety lighting, jewel-toned palettes, theatrical styling and the haze of analogue film grain.
(The Glitter Coven by Noelle van Dijk.)
The nostalgia here is deliberate and stylised. It reconstructs the collective memory of the past, using AI to simulate not realism, but the texture of imagination. It’s cinematic déjà vu. Something you swear you’ve seen before, even though it never existed.
This interplay between past and present has moved from art into brand storytelling.
In fashion, Casablanca Paris’s Futuro Optimisto campaign, created by artist Luke Nugent, merged the brand’s retro aesthetic with cutting-edge AI craft. Nugent worked alongside stylists and set designers to prompt, refine and direct imagery that felt as tactile and cinematic as a real shoot. The campaign used AI to fuse 1970s warmth with futuristic surrealism.
(Futuro Optimisto by Luke Nugent.)
In FMCG, Slice’s 2025 relaunch created an entire media ecosystem using Google’s Gemini, Imagen and Veo to construct a fully AI-built 1990s radio world, 106.3FM The Fizz. Forty original songs, two synthetic DJs and a full suite of visuals brought the decade to life at scale. They used AI to simulate cultural memory in a way that felt lived-in, nostalgic and playful. The result turned a product relaunch into a cultural event, bridging Gen X nostalgia with Gen Z’s fascination for the analogue past.
But nostalgia in AI demands care. When misused or undisclosed, it undermines the authenticity it seeks to evoke. J.Crew’s recent controversy — where alleged AI-generated models were passed off as real in a campaign echoing the brand’s 1990s Americana look — shows how quickly trust can erode. In cases like these, even subtle inconsistencies, like warped hands or impossible postures, can break the illusion and damage credibility.
For enterprise brands, the lesson runs deeper. In sectors like fintech or medtech, where precision and trust define reputation, nostalgic cues can humanise technology and reinforce continuity. Used strategically, they can be a reminder that even in a world built by algorithms, heritage and emotion still drive connection.
That same nostalgic pull is now shaping how even AI-native brands tell their stories. OpenAI’s latest “With ChatGPT” campaign stepped away from the sterile, synthetic aesthetic so common in tech. Instead, they leaned into grain, texture and the imperfect charm of the real world — real people, real places, natural light. It felt almost retro in its honesty.
The marketing world, led by voices like Mark Ritson, was quick to celebrate the move. It captured a wider truth – that audiences crave the human pulse behind innovation. Increasingly, brands are pairing genuine footage with AI-driven post-production, using technology to extend, not replace, reality. It’s proof that even as tools evolve, the most resonant stories remain the most real.
Let’s ride the WAVE.
Across every trend, direction defines distinction. AI can’t author originality. But people using AI can. The technology only cuts through when guided by human intention, intuition and restraint. Used well, it can deepen creativity, giving brands a new visual language. One that can be more expressive and alive than before.
In our next WAVE, we’ll turn to the human side of the equation. How audiences are responding to the AI aesthetic. How authenticity, craft and creative ethics are redefining what’s credible in a synthetic age. And how brands can build trust while embracing the tools shaping the future.
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