A venture I keep returning to: Mediterranean azulejo patterns, built from colour harmony, geometry and composition rather than floral ornament. Simpler forms, deliberately — because the simple ones carry variation better, and variation is what makes a collection enthralling rather than merely attractive. A pattern that holds its character across a wall, a product, a surface, a space.
The interesting part is not whether a machine can generate a tile. It obviously can. The question is whether it can hold nuance — whether generated variation can carry culture, self-expression and character, or whether those are precisely the things that collapse the moment generation takes over.
What if intelligence belongs to the detail, and not to the picture?
Not the strategy, not the sequence, not the composition — but the thousand small decisions inside a decision a person has already made.
That inverts how AI is usually deployed in creative work, where it is handed the whole brief and asked for an outcome. It also happens to be the same argument the compendium makes about enterprise AI, arriving from the opposite direction: the machine is strongest where judgment is already settled, and weakest where judgment is the work. A collaborative construct rather than a generative one.
Unresolved, and published here deliberately. If you work in craft, in luxury, or in generative systems and this is your problem too, I would like to hear how you see it.