Perceptual Evaluations: Evals for Aesthetics — Diego Rodriguez, Krea.ai
Aug 23, 2025 · 16:28
Diego Rodriguez, cofounder of Krea.ai, argues that current AI evaluations fail to capture human perception and aesthetics, leading to metrics that misjudge generative media. He traces how compression standards like JPEG and MP3 exploit human sensory limits yet their artifacts poison AI training data, making models blind to what humans instantly see wrong. Standard metrics like FID score penalize perceptually identical images, while models cannot evaluate subjective qualities like artistic meaning. Rodriguez calls for new "perceptually aware" metrics trained on human opinions, echoing a friend's insight that predicting cars was easy but traffic was hard — the real challenge is evaluating AI's impact on creative expression. Krea.ai, an 8-person startup, invites researchers to join work on aesthetics research and hyper-personalization for generative multimedia.
