Yellowing of AI: The Golden Hour Before Sunset
When I visit home, I love flipping through old photo albums. From ski trips to vacations to Disney and every birthday in between, my mom has collected dozens of filled photo books. Recently, she realized the photos are taking on a yellow varnish, simply from being 20+ years old. To preserve these memories, she started a detailed and extensive project to digitally scan the collection.
Of course, paper yellows, photographs fade, varnish cracks. Time fades memories as much as we try to hold onto them.
But, I noticed a funny similarity between the photos Mom scanned and the AI images created online. And, if you’re here, I think you noticed it too: AI is yellowing.
Artificial intelligence seems to be skipping ahead in the aging process. The yellowing of AI was first noticed over the past few months where images generated by models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT appear glowing with a yellow haze. It’s always golden hour, and my theory is that AI is close to sunsetting.
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Yellowing of AI: Yellowing in History
The irony is that visual art and photography have wrestled with yellowing for centuries. Early photographs often took on a sepia look as chemicals oxidized. Paintings varnished in the Renaissance turned amber with age, muting stunning blue skies into a mustard yellow.
Many museums spend years restoring blues swallowed by time. Over time, many paintings start to yellow, which hides bright colors like blue. Museums use careful restoration to clean away the discoloration and bring those original colors back. Restoring the blue isn’t just about looks—it helps people today see the artwork as the artist meant it to be seen.
Conservation efforts, whether through careful restoration, climate regulation, or digital archiving, allow art to keep speaking, generation after generation. Without preservation, we risk losing not just the work itself, but the voice, struggle, and spirit behind it.
If you are interested in the restoration and preservation of art, you may like this other article I wrote on The Destruction of Art.
The “why” behind all this is even more mysterious.
One theory for this yellowing is the use of linseed oil in oil painting. According to George O’Hanlon and Painting Best Practices, “this phenomenon occurs due to the oxidation and polymerization of the oil.” But, it seems this yellowing is reversible by sun-bleaching your oil painting, as seen in the experiment visualized below.
Unfortunately, the mystery of why paints yellow has yet to be solved. Numerous environmental factors play into testing materials, contributing to complicated chemistry behind the mustard-ization of artwork over time. Sarah Sands with JustPaint.org lists these environmental factors including the following:
- “Humidity,
- temperature,
- the amount and type of light,
- periods of darkness,
- exposure to chemicals,
- the pigments used,
- the type of oil and the method of processing it,
- presence of impurities,
- the thickness of the paint,
- use or lack of driers,
- added mediums,
- differences in formulations,
- and a host of other variables…”
Yellowing of AI: The Color Theory Problem
If you ask a color theorist, yellow can be tricky. As the lightest primary color, yellow can sometimes dominate a piece when it’s unbalanced, just like bananas in smoothies.
An artist knows the general basics of the color wheel and easy color theory: you mix blue and yellow to get green. A more developed artist like a watercolor painter knows to mix 90% yellow with 10% blue to create a green smoothie that doesn’t taste solely like bananas.
They also know that warmer colors are pushed forward while cooler colors are pushed back. It’s why Gainsborough was such a baddie.
A great mastery of color theory and artistic ego and spunk
All this to say, an artist understands the principles, elements, theories, and nuances of art. A human understands the need for art and how it makes humanity better. AI does not.
In AI’s case, it isn’t a painter reaching for cadmium—it’s a statistical hiccup. Are we really surprised that the robot favors warmth?
Yellowing of AI: Ouroboros
In late March and early April 2025, the AI art world noticed this new quirk and called it “the yellowing of AI.” Images created from DALL-E, Midjourney, and especially ChatGPT kept showing up with a yellow tint, as if every canvas had been washed in yellow ochre. Subreddits like /r/ChatGPT and /r/ChatGPTPro first noticed the trend, and it’s grown more popular since.
While the possibilities for this golden hiccup are unknown, I have my theories.
The first theory is that AI models are trained on yellow images. If you put in old, sepia photos and filtered Instagram posts, you may see them circulate back to you. The models are fed information from all over, most notably the free and public internet. If the AI can’t differentiate an old image from a heavily filtered image, then it may believe that both photos come from the same time period and are actively relevant.
Another theory is that AI is chewing on its own leftovers. As more generated images feed back into training sets, the flaws are exponentially exaggerated. If half those images lean yellow, the model doubles down, convinced it has discovered the truth of beauty. The ouroboros metaphor is almost too perfect: the AI swallows its tail, burps out more golden sludge, and calls it progress.
In project management terms, AI’s golden hour isn’t shining. It’s sunsetting.
Yellowing of AI: Do Artists Still Matter? P.S. They Do!
A painter knows when to glaze a yellow to add warmth and that sunset glow to a landscape painting. A photographer knows to run outside to capture the golden hour at the perfect moment. An AI model doesn’t know the nuances of creating art, it just predicts what it thinks the audience wants.
When every image comes out mustard, it reminds us why actual artists are irreplaceable. We don’t just reproduce—we choose, edit, and improvise. The yellowing glitch is proof that craft and judgment can’t be automated away.
The real question we need to be asking is whether AI models will learn and evolve to comprehend and create true art. Personally, I think this process will take time, but it may be inevitable. And its not because the AI will get smarter, though that is true. AI will learn to comprehend and create art because we as a species and as a society are failing human artists.
A beautiful painting is created, but if no one sees it, is it art?
I can write article after article about this, but if no one reads them, do they matter?
We live in a time where creativity is everywhere, but meaning feels harder to find. I think about this a lot when I watch a video of an artist paint the Mona Lisa in 30-seconds, but it’s buried under trends, or dismissed as “just content.” Somewhere along the way, we stopped giving art the space it deserves.
During the Renaissance, fine art was meant to challenge people. It questioned power, religion, and beauty in ways that made people feel uncomfortable. It meant something. But now, fine art feels like it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It’s not that people don’t care about art, it’s just that so much of it is made to be content, not to be felt.
Yellowing of AI: Why Actually Nothing Matters
When art starts to lose its value, it tends to start to disappear. We scroll past talent, overlook technique, and straight up ignore beauty. And what happens if people can’t recognize the value of a painting or sculpture in peace, what happens to that art in times of conflict? The less we appreciate it, the less we fight to protect it.
When artists are threatened and AI can develop a complex emotion visually better than you can create it on paper, do you choose the path of least resistence? Or do you fight for the art you love? Do you give in to technology and progress because AI said it was “progressive?”
Obviously I can’t answer these questions without sounding like a hypocrite, so I will leave it here for your own judgement. The truth is that AI is yellowing. Images created by AI models are turning mustard and you can choose to see it as a pretty sunset or a sick and twisted death.
Are we watching a golden revolution in art—or just the longest sunset in history?
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