German media scholar Roland Meyer reveals AI image synthesis tools to be “redundancy processing machines,” as he pushes Midjourney’s new zoom-out feature to the extreme. Prompting a “family enjoying a barbecue” that yields a painterly “all-white, middle-class, suburban American dream world,” the AI keeps adding more of the same—more white people, more barbecue grills—as Meyer zooms out. “Redundancies collapse in on themselves,” muses Meyer, until, eventually, “clichés turn into nightmares.”