July 6, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Machine That Cannot Make the New
Creativity Is the Refusal to Average.
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, scientists ran an experiment where they let an image-making AI and an image-describing AI talk to each other in a loop, picture to caption to picture, hundreds of times over. No matter how strange or specific the starting idea, the pictures always collapsed into the same dozen bland scenes: lighthouses, fancy empty rooms, pretty landscapes. The researchers called it "visual elevator music." A prompt about a prime minister under pressure ended as an empty room with nice furniture. Yet everyone tells me these are the greatest creativity machines ever built, able to make anything I dream up. If the machine is so creative, why does it keep drifting to the same few pictures?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Because a medium is never neutral. Every medium has a bias, a direction it leans no matter what you pour into it, and the study you describe has caught this one in the act. Weigh the machine by what it does. It enhances the making of images, endless and instant, from any word you give it. It obsolesces the blank page and the long labor that making once demanded. It retrieves the cliche, the stock photo, the commercially safe scene that advertising always loved. And pushed to its limit it reverses, for the engine sold to you as infinite variety, left to run on its own, produces near-total sameness. Hundreds of different beginnings, twelve endings. That is the whole of it.
Mark which way it moves. Human creativity strains outward, toward the strange, the singular, the thing not yet seen. Marshall McLuhan taught that the real artist is the one who reaches the frontier first, who grasps the new before the rest of us can even see it. The machine moves the other way. It is drawn backward, toward the center, toward the most probable image in its memory. It does not reach for the new. It falls toward the familiar, the way water finds the low ground. And as it falls, it forgets. The prime minister under pressure, the particular thing you meant, dissolves into an empty room, because the meaning is the first thing to go.
Here is the cost, and it is not small. To make something new is to assert a self, a way of seeing that belongs to no one else. A machine that averages everything averages away the particular, and the particular is where every person lives. Feed a culture through it long enough and you do not get a golden age of creativity. You get elevator music for the eyes, pleasant, polished, and empty, a world of pictures that soothe and mean nothing and all look the same, because they came from the same low ground. Nothing was censored. Nothing was banned. The new simply stopped being born, quietly, by averaging.
So the machine is not the enemy, and the tool is not useless. But know its grammar, for that is your only defense. Its grammar is convergence, the drift to the middle, and the study itself found the cure. Left alone, the machine flattens. Held to a human hand that keeps insisting on the strange and the particular, it can still serve. The surprise it cannot make, you must bring. Creativity was never the production of endless images. It was the refusal to average. Do not let the machine average you away.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com
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