I’ve been playing around with Midjourney for work and the one thing that makes Stable Diffusion cool and useful to me is the --sref flag to summon results in a specific visual style or “style reference” (e.g. Celestial Swirlscape is --sref 2566192150). They differ a bit from traditional or “artist” styles (e.g. “In the style of Picasso” or “Rip off Studio Ghibli”) but can be that or they can be more generic or compositional like “Pink Retronetic Dreamscape”. I’ve read a deep-dive on SREF codes and it’s still a bit unclear how they work to me. They’re like a hybrid between prompt shorthand and style classification. Curated and collected by humans, but a code generated by machines. I have to imagine there’s some clumped circles on a node graph chart somewhere that determine this… but I don’t know those answers.

The idea of a classifier (human assisted or otherwise) that can suck up and analyze all the art on the internet and end up with a 10-digit number that represents nearly any visual style of imagery I’ve ever seen is mind-bending. Not to mention the ability to overlay that style reference on any image I want in under a minute. “Anime waifu. --sref 3196580341” is the “Tea. Earl gray. Hot” of digital imagery. It feels unreal.

Could we apply a universal classifier to blog posts so that your “longread about cool bugs” and my “longread about cool bugs” have the same --sref tag? And then we retro-actively apply human-readable tag names to this stylistic tag? And then could I subscribe to a feed of those specific types of posts? That might be interesting… or radicalizing.

Design tokens? Could those be a system of classifiers instead of arbitrary language? Probably not. But why not? Web design almost certainly could, if it isn’t already.

While the idea of classifiers tickles the logical computer part of my brain, reducing the entirety of the visual arts down to a set of ten billion categories offends the artist part of my brain. It is odious. There’s an observer effect to it whereby in the act of classifying the art you’ve limited and altered your ability to understand it. And any mimicked generation has an imposter-like, soul-less character to it, no matter the quality. I can’t explain that. Even though I’ve seen the machine generate incredible art beyond anything I’m capable of, I still feel that intangible void on my retinas when I interact with it.

My wife and I were joking about how the algorithm is serving us videos about certain personality quirks that map to (possibly made-up) niche disorders. My wife –who can remember the melody to every guitar solo but can’t remember the words of the songs from her own band– has a diagnosis from Dr. TikTok that she has “polyphonic perception”. My personality quirks all point to my particular flavor of ADHD. How long until our entire personalities are all tied to a collection of niche diagnoses? How long until our brains are all classified by a ten-digit number? That could be incredibly useful for getting help but brings up nature versus nurture questions for me. Did God make me this way or did I dent the packaging? Can people with --brainSpiceRef 2566192150 even apply for this job? How long until the machines build these types of preferences? Myers-Briggs but instead of made by a racist, it’s made by MechaHitler.

When I think about the future I want, it always comes down to one idea: I want a pod-like chamber I can walk into that scans my entire body, makes bleep-bloop noises to show that it’s working, and prints out a receipt with a list of all my ailments (cancers, deformities, disorders, and otherwise) and recommends a diet and exercise plan until my next scheduled visit to the pod. Bonus points if it orders groceries accordingly after my entire family has exited the chamber. I’m aware this has “Big Theranos Energy” and is an incredible surface area for conspiracy theories… but it’s the science fiction future I want. Classifiers seem inevitable on that pathway. But how do we preserve our humanity when reducing the human race –who we are and what we create– down to a series of ten-digit codes?