Appreciating the Poetic Misunderstandings of A.I. Art

What does an "Art Deco Buddhist temple" look like? The phrase is nearly nonsensical; it's hard to imagine a Buddhist temple built in the Art Deco style, the early-twentieth-century Western aesthetic of attenuated architecture and streamlined forms. But this didn't deter the Twitter account @images_ai, which promises "images generated by A.I. machines." When another Twitter user threw out that prompt, in early August, @images_ai responded with a picture that looks something like an Orientalist Disney castle, a mashup of pointy spires and red angled roofs with a patterned stone-gray façade. Or perhaps it resembles the archetypal Chinese Buddhist temple crossed with a McDonald's--a fleeting, half-remembered image from a dream frozen into a permanent JPEG on social media.