When was the last time you were surprised by AI?

I’m often impressed by the quality of AI, sometimes I’m even fooled into believing that something that is not real is real, but I’m hardly ever “surprised” by seeing something I had never seen before, which is actually surreal..

I've been thinking about how much of what comes out of prompt-based models is aesthetically boring. AI slop is, unfortunately, not a failure of the models but exactly what they've been trained to produce.

I'm curious what people have seen recently that looks different and novel? And what are the techniques that people use to escape from the promptable latent space (e.g. direct latent sampling, semantic sliders, evolutionary breeding, etc) ? Who are the main artists exploring these grounds?