Algorithmic Art Claimed to Have No Bias. Bluesky Called It What It Is.

An account promoting a new NFT collection on X posted something this week that reads like an accidental confession. The pitch for Cuboideth — a generative art project built entirely in Python — promised collectors something rare: "pure algorithmic art" with "no human bias." Every piece generated by code alone, the post explained, as if the absence of a human hand in the final image meant the absence of human choices in the system producing it. The post got modest traction, 14 likes and a handful of retweets, but the framing it deployed is one of the most durable myths in AI bias and fairness — and it arrived the same week Bluesky was running out of patience with exactly that kind of thinking.

The Bluesky post that captured the week's mood came from someone watching the same dynamic play out in political argument. "Will some of you please stop generating bollocks AI images to prove your points," they wrote, "because it's exactly what the right does, asking the delusion machine to confirm their bias." The post called it lazy. It called out the environmental cost. It ended with a pointed alternative: "Pick up a pen or be funnier with words." Fourteen likes — the same count as the NFT pitch — but a completely different emotional weight. One post was selling neutrality. The other was rejecting the premise that neutrality exists.

These two posts, appearing within days of each other with nearly identical engagement, describe the central confusion that keeps surfacing in AI fairness research: the assumption that removing a human from the generation step removes human judgment from the system. The NFT promoter isn't wrong that no artist drew Cuboideth's outputs. But someone wrote the Python. Someone chose the parameters. Someone decided which outputs to keep and which to discard during testing. The algorithm doesn't launder those decisions — it just makes them harder to see, which is a different problem than the one the pitch was trying to solve. Meanwhile, on Bluesky, the complaint about AI-generated meme images isn't really about aesthetics. It's about epistemic hygiene: when you ask a model trained on internet data to illustrate your argument, you're not finding evidence, you're manufacturing confirmation. The "delusion machine" framing is sharper than it sounds.

The news coverage running alongside these posts — stories about $2-per-hour content moderators, Filipino workers at the sharp end of AI production, and a leaked document about training practices — points to what the neutrality myth actually obscures. Every system marketed as purely algorithmic was shaped by someone who needed the rent money and agreed to label data at a rate that wouldn't sustain them anywhere in the Global North. The code is not separate from those choices. It is downstream of them. The Bluesky user telling people to pick up a pen already understood this. The NFT account, almost certainly, did not.