Universal Aesthetic Alignment Narrows Artistic Expression

Image generation and reward models default to a single, average notion of beauty. When users explicitly ask for anti-aesthetic, abstract, or emotionally negative imagery, these systems quietly sanitize, brighten, and smile back. We call this reversed alignment: instead of aligning the model to the user, the user gets aligned to the model. The effect reaches past direct users into public visual culture, forming a feedback loop that could collapse the long tail of artistic expression.