English

Position: Universal Aesthetic Alignment Narrows Artistic Expression

Computers and Society 2026-05-13 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Over-aligning image generation models to a generalized aesthetic preference conflicts with user intent, particularly when "anti-aesthetic" outputs are requested for artistic or critical purposes. This adherence prioritizes developer-centered values, compromising user autonomy and aesthetic pluralism. We test this bias by constructing a wide-spectrum aesthetics dataset and evaluating state-of-the-art generation and reward models. This position paper finds that aesthetic-aligned generation models frequently default to conventionally beautiful outputs, failing to respect instructions for low-quality or negative imagery. Crucially, reward models penalize anti-aesthetic images even when they perfectly match the explicit user prompt. We confirm this systemic bias through image-to-image editing and evaluation against real abstract artworks. Our code, fine-tuned models, and datasets are available on our meta-expression intentionally anti-aesthetics webpage: https://weathon.github.io/icml2026_position/.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.11883,
  title  = {Position: Universal Aesthetic Alignment Narrows Artistic Expression},
  author = {Wenqi Marshall Guo and Qingyun Qian and Khalad Hasan and Shan Du},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.11883},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:22:42.428Z