The current models have a fundamental architectural flaw: Every pixel they output costs the model as much effort as every other one. When you see detail in a work a human produced, the fact that there is detail communicates something about what the artist was focussing on. It shows you what they cared about, and by extension what you, the viewer, should care about to understand the piece. The AI, as currently designed, can’t do that, because it’s outputting entire raster images at once (and multi-pass generations tend to degrade into melty nonsense), it emphasises everything, and so emphasises nothing.

The “AI look” is a manifestation of the architecture itself, and that’s why you can really train or prompt around it. At best, bigger models have been able to partially suppress the worst aspects of it by throwing more parameters at the problem, but put the models under even a tiny bit of stress and the same flaws reemerge.