I think this image shows how AI shortens the vibe-to-real loop The meme on the right isn’t pulled from a “real” show, but it reads as one because it’s a blend of references: 80s OVA rendering, a 90s-style mascot penguin (similar to Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Pen-Pen), 2010s soft-goth silhouette and a popular 2020s joke turned caption. It’s a timeline composite made from shards of style floating around your feed, made tangible by generative AI. It matches what you’ve already remixed in your head, so it lands instantly. Pre AI, capturing a vibe into media was harder. You would have to perceive the vibe, have the skill to make it legible, and then post. Image models now let you iterate with keywords and get there in minutes. We can assume most everything we see online is sitting somewhere in latent space, so you can extract an approximate result with the right words. Prompting removed the skill barrier. It goes something like this: People catch a vibe -> compress to keywords -> model renders -> post -> consensus (repeat) The last step is important. Flooding the world with AI outputs wouldn’t turn these vibes into objects. They need network consensus, shared belief, to cross the line. You need a critical number of people to confirm your thing is aligned to their subjective experience. Once the timeline says “yeah, that” the loop starts again and the vibe gets a bit more explicit. The picture on the left shows the last step, the vibe gets staged IRL, further reifying it. Now, “Penguin goth femme-fatale aisle convenience store scene” is legible enough that it’s shorthand for a thing-that-exists. You get what it’s saying, you might even identify with it. No wonder it’s such a popular post, the ghost you’ve been seeing online so many times is now flesh and bone, and everyone else sees it too. Authorship shifts from making to selecting and steering. You're not creating these aesthetics so much as collapsing them from circulation into a specific form. AI changes the materialization speed of distributed aesthetics, lowering the threshold for reification. We already see this: Shein manufactures micro-trends before they fully crystallize, fast fashion algorithms collapsing social media circulation into product.