the invisible influence

The cognitive risk that leaves no artifact to examine. When a tool becomes fully ready-to-hand its embedded defaults become correspondingly invisible — the user not merely unaware of using it but unaware of its influence on the outcome, because it has stopped being an object of scrutiny. A different risk from deepfakes or unlicensed images: it operates on judgment during the process, before any output exists, and shows up only as the gradual homogenisation of aesthetic judgment itself. Averaging toward dominance is this same levelling in the corpus rather than in the judging.