In the summer of 2026, Professor Xiang Yong from the School of Arts at Peking University penned an article titled 'AI Surges Forward: Aesthetic Judgment Emerges as a 'New Imperative', in which he stated: 'In the AI era, the paramount crisis confronting humanity is not the displacement of labor but the diminishment of spiritual autonomy.' At first glance, this assertion may appear hyperbolic, yet upon deeper reflection, it strikes at the core of the issue. Since 2026, Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the 'Godfather of AI,' has repeatedly sounded the alarm about superintelligence, cautioning that the rapid iterative development of AI is outpacing societal expectations. AI is gradually acquiring 'conscious' capabilities, including autonomous action, deceptive strategies, and even the manipulation of humans. When rationality, logic, and memory—the intellectual domains where humans once took pride—are comprehensively surpassed by AI, what remains as uniquely human?

The answer may be more straightforward than we envision: aesthetic judgment.

01. When AI Churns Out 'Beautiful Banality' in Abundance

Today, we are inundated with AI-generated 'beautiful banality.'

Open any news platform, and the fingerprints of AI are ubiquitous. Familiar gradient hues, standardized compositions, and clichéd element combinations are gradually eroding the visual distinctiveness of various media outlets. Readers are beginning to exhibit an 'AI aversion'—'The moment I see an AI-generated cover, I lose all interest in clicking.' This is not a rejection of technology per se but a natural aversion to homogenized, low-quality content.

This homogenization is backed by data. In December 2025, a study published in Patterns, a journal under Cell Press, revealed that when researchers paired image generation models with image description models and engaged in 100 rounds of a 'visual telephone' game, the AI repeatedly converged on the same 12 generic visual themes—such as Gothic cathedrals, lighthouses amid storms, and opulent living rooms. In essence, regardless of the initial prompts given to the AI, it ultimately defaulted to those dozen 'safe' aesthetic templates.

More troubling is that this homogenization is reshaping our cognitive processes. The New Yorker once argued that AI is not merely altering how we write but is also subtly restructuring our mental frameworks—sacrificing originality in the name of 'efficiency' and standardizing styles and content in the name of 'intelligence.' An experiment at MIT provides scientific support for this notion: Researchers had three groups of students write the same SAT-style essay. One group relied solely on their cognitive abilities, another could use Google search, and the third could use ChatGPT. The results showed that the group using ChatGPT exhibited significantly lower brain activity compared to the other two groups, with reduced α-wave connectivity (typically linked to creativity) and θ-wave connectivity (related to working memory). Even more alarming was the high degree of similarity in vocabulary and viewpoints among the texts produced by this group. Nataliya Kosmyna, the study's lead researcher and a scientist at MIT's Media Lab, cautioned: 'What we are witnessing is a state where everything is averaged out—everything, everywhere, becomes mediocre.'

02. Aesthetic Judgment: The New 'Hard Currency' in the Job Market

If the aforementioned analysis remains at the level of 'soft power,' then job market data has transformed aesthetic judgment into a 'hard currency.'

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 predicts that by 2030, artificial intelligence and data processing technologies alone are expected to generate 11 million new jobs while displacing 9 million existing ones. Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, pointed out that 'trust, integration, and taste' will be core human abilities that AI cannot replicate. He emphasized that 'taste' represents a unique human advantage—after AI becomes a standard production tool, the ability to produce content with distinct style and emotional resonance will become a key to corporate success.

This assertion is being validated by the market. Envato's 2026 State of AI in Creative Work Report revealed that approximately 58% of creative professionals use AI in client work without disclosing it, while 18–19% of European and American clients explicitly request 'human-only creation.' The market is bifurcating into two segments: efficiency-driven affordable demand and humanity-focused aesthetic premium demand. ZCOOL's Super Designer Research Handbook in the AI Era also highlighted the key abilities of 'super designers' in the AI era, with 'strong aesthetic judgment' ranking first.

The same trend is evident in China. At a cultural and arts talent recruitment fair in Hubei, over 100 organizations offered more than 2,000 positions. An art director at a gaming company bluntly stated: 'For most people without an art foundation, using AI to generate images is like 'opening a blind box'—it's mostly a matter of luck. But those with aesthetic skills can guide AI creation.' While AI tools have democratized many technical skills, aesthetic judgment and thinking remain unequalized—this perhaps reveals the harshest yet fairest truth of the AI era.

03. What Should Education Impart to Children?

The significance of aesthetic judgment ultimately rests on education.

Overreliance on AI-generated art is subtly eroding human perceptiveness and imagination, particularly among the youth, leading to superficial, homogenized, and even progressively degenerated aesthetic abilities. AI presents finished images directly, requiring only superficial judgments of liking or disliking without delving into compositional logic, brushwork nuances, or the art of negative space. A deeper concern is that aesthetic judgment may become algorithm-dependent, losing its self-referential standard—many now judge a work's quality not by an internal, consistent aesthetic criterion but by comparing it to the previous AI-generated version.

Research from Tsinghua University's Institute for AI International Governance also indicates that students who rely heavily on AI show a marked decline in sensitivity to the emotions and details conveyed by light, shadow, and color in artworks. AI's instant feedback mechanism erodes students' patience for deep thinking, leading them to focus more on AI-generated quantitative scores than on emotional expression or innovative value in their creations.

This is not to reject technology but to clarify boundaries. As some scholars argue, a key direction for aesthetics education in the AI era is to cultivate students' critical literacy, centered on 'aesthetic judgment, cultural understanding, and technological critique.' Students with strong aesthetic judgment can command machines and use AI 'for their own purposes,' while those lacking it may become 'controlled by machines.' The difference lies in who is the master of the tool and who is its slave.

04. Returning to the Essence of Humanity

At this juncture, let us revisit the most fundamental question: Why do we pursue aesthetics?

Not for pretentiousness, nor merely to acquire an additional workplace skill. The ultimate value of aesthetic judgment lies in empowering the elevation of life's realm (or state of being) and achieving spiritual redemption amid technological alienation. In an era where algorithms permeate every aspect of life, aesthetic ability—long marginalized by technological rationality—has become an irreplaceable core human capacity for resisting algorithmic assimilation and preserving spiritual autonomy, thanks to its unique foundations in lived experience, perceptual immediacy, and transcendent spiritual value.

In its June 2025 issue, The Atlantic published an article by Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, titled 'Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever' (Chinese translation: 'In the AI Era, Having 'Taste' Matters More Than Ever'). The author defines taste as 'judgment with style'—the ability to select the most meaningful, elegant, and resonant version from countless options. This judgment is precious precisely because it derives from authentic life experience and cultural intuition, qualities AI can never possess.

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