More Liquid, More Solid: Generative AI and The Future of Genre Under Postreality

Through generative AI, the role of genre in creative canon(s) is simultaneously liquifying and solidifying—softening genre boundaries while reasserting their utility as creative material.

[Quick update before I dive in: I’ve recently launched the Reality Studies podcast. If you’re subscribed here, you’ll see these episodes in your inbox, and/or wherever else you listen to podcasts. But if you prefer seeing the full videos, Reality Studies is also on YouTube! Here’s the first episode with Taylor Lorenz.]

One of the less-hyped aspects of the generative AI discourse is how it will shift our relationship to genre—and genre’s relationship to us. Though genre might initially seem like a secondary consideration in creative production, it plays a critical role in establishing audiences’ expectations and in the ultimate reception of artworks and creative acts.

The imagined ideal of the lone artist toiling away in the privacy of her studio, away from pesky considerations of audience, critics, and market, is already understood to be fallacy in the contemporary creative environment—which, like every other industry or pursuit, is deeply mediatized. So the idea that an artist or designer wouldn’t in some way consider genre or creative canon in their own outputs—or that it might *gasp* inform how they craft their work—feels silly at this point. But where I think generative AI stands to further trouble this boundary is through the centering of prompting as a key interaction mechanism with generative engines. My sense is that, as the practice of prompting continues to emerge as its own craft, the more pronounced genre’s role will become in the creation of art and design.

This evolving relationship to genre points to a future with new hybrid creative forms, but it gets even weirder to imagine how the respective conventions and boundaries of genre will be historicized, (re)imagined, and (re)incorporated into creative acts. In other words: a feedback loop is created when human creators deepen and complicate genre by metabolizing these outputs and then re-engage with generative tools. Set, repeat.

What follows are a few case studies through which we can evaluate how genre might evolve in the wake of publicly accessible generative AI tools, and how that could impact future creative efforts. I hope to demonstrate how they embody a metamodern mode of cultural production and ultimately reinforce arguments I have made about the Postreality paradigm.

You don’t need to know too much about either Postreality or Metamodernism to read this essay. I will explain my sense of how generative AI intersects with these terms in greater detail in the conclusion, but by way of a quick foundation:

• Postreality is the reality paradigm that emerged after (and from within, and in contradistinction to) Modernity, bubbling up in the wake of the Second World War and persisting through today. It is typified by non-monolithic, interdependent, synthetic, and more-than-human approaches to the social construction of reality (establishing consensus with each other about what is real). More on Postreality here.

• Metamodernism is described as a structure of feeling that arose after postmodernism, which describes an “oscillation” between the aspects of modernism (yay grand narratives, individual genius, and universal ideals!) and postmodernism (everything is relative and grand narratives are dangerous; irony is a scalpel). Since the resurgence of the term in 2009, scholarship across different fields has broadened and diversified its meaning and usage (competing opinions proliferate). If this subject appeals to you I recommend this piece for a crash course in recent developments in metamodernism/metamodernity and how they do and don’t fit together. For my purposes in this essay, what I see as key to understanding metamodern creativity is a reconstitutive, hybrid approach to making—one that is in constant dialogue with other social, creative, and artistic content as a function of online interconnectedness.

Zombie Wes Andersonism

Earlier this summer, the “Wes Anderson” trend—in which users presented their lives ostensibly “in the style” of the film director—swept TikTok. Then, some began to use image generators to riff on the trend, assembling trailers for films in other major franchises including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars—as directed by “Wes Anderson.”

Wes Anderson is riffable in this way because his style is idiosyncratic, and has maintained some degree of aesthetic continuity across his nearly 30-year career. If you’ve been on the Internet, you have an idea what this entails—the tracksuits, subjects framed in the center, the subtle interferences with the fourth wall, the earth tones and playful pastels, the twee vibes.

But how connected are these techniques to the experience of watching an actual film by Wes Anderson, like his latest, Asteroid City? What if these are actually reinforcing a simulacrum of Wes Anderson that’s not really accurate? That’s exactly the claim Stuart Heritage recently made in The Guardian:

The problem is, though, that none of these things actually spoof Wes Anderson. The only thing they do is spoof other Wes Anderson spoofs, in particular Saturday Night Live’s Wes Anderson horror movie spoof from four years ago. Like all the newer parodies, they were just a loose collection of tropes – kids in matching tracksuits, old tents, the colour brown – except it was made by incredibly talented people with a large production budget and a clear appreciation for Anderson’s work, as opposed to a computer program that can stitch Bill Murray’s face on to the body of Gandalf so ineptly that it looks like every nightmare you’ve ever had rolled into one.