We’re entering a strange inversion point with work, one defined by the rise of polished overabundance, a world where the ability to produce images, videos, and ideas has become nearly frictionless.
Contrast this to most of human history, where the finished object held the value. The painting. The film. The product. What it was mattered. How it was made was someone else’s problem, the craftsman’s, the factory’s, the studio’s.
We will quickly get to a spot where we won’t trust or even register the images/videos/works as special anymore. We will need some other method of verifying the “value.” And while the geopolitical implications of deepfaked world leaders are real, the more useful point here is simpler: when images become untrustworthy, their meaning collapses, and the burden shifts to the maker to demonstrate intent and authenticity.
Try to go back just a few years, before ChatGPT and image models. Back then, a brand pulling off a spectacular, high‑effort visual moment would stop you in your tracks. You would take note. Now, it's commonplace. Expected, even. You scroll right by.
This dynamic has played out before. Handmade Belgian lace was once so valuable that it was regulated by luxury taxes and regulated like alcohol, smuggled across borders, willed to heirs like jewelry. Then machine looms arrived, and within a generation, lace became decorative trim. The object didn't change, just the value of its creation.
We're watching this happen again, just faster and more completely—a deluge of posts, images, and media that quickly blurs into noise. This will continue; like fast food and cable TV before it, you cannot (and should not) fight AI slop. Some will be great and creative and novel and will cut through, but most won't. Noise will intensify. The algorithm and our attention will decide.
And yet we still yearn for human-scale meaning — a desire that’s clearer when separated from the specific examples that follow, which are better placed in the dedicated examples section below. We still want to feel that tingle of care connecting us to whoever made the thing. I have seen more signs of this recently. Maybe right now, just at the “high-end,” the companies and creative makers who we’ve collectively defined to have “taste” (A24, Stripe, Apple), it would appear that the process is the antidote to this phenomenon. How it was made and by whom matters increasingly. Is there more to the story, to its provenance? Did it show the authors are credible enough to know and care for the details?
Take filmmaking, for example, not as a story about meticulous detail, but as a demonstration of how the process itself becomes the source of meaning. For decades, filmmakers have had access to CGI, green screens, and entire synthetic environments. Yet the work that resonates most deeply tends to come from directors who let the making shape the outcome. A committed process introduces constraints, unpredictability, and texture, all of which accumulate into something the audience can feel, even if they can’t articulate why.
Nearly every great film includes a “making of,” because understanding the process unlocks the emotional charge inside the work: how the film was shot, how actors inhabited their roles, how worlds were constructed or researched into being.
This has bled into the marketing of films: Timothée Chalamet’s recent Zoom meeting for Marty Supreme brought the audience into a meta of the film's marketing and deliberately toeing the line between genuine behind-the-scenes moment and engineered mememaking, providing provenance to the end result. What made the bit work was the trail of real outputs (a real blimp over CA and TX, a viral jacket) coming from real people, capturing it in the real world. It was messy and a bit sloppy in parts but felt like it was unfolding naturally.
We’re seeing this now in digital production, where brands are making a choice to take the practical, manual way, even if the result is indecipherable to the end audience. Apple TV made a point to do a small amount of design press on the making of their new intro card, pointing out that it is, in fact, real glass. Stripe’s Black Friday website was a physical model city full of wood and glue and, yes, imperfections. Tiny storefronts and street signs. Easter eggs referencing iconic customers. A world in which every building was a nod to someone who uses Stripe. And on the simpler end of the spectrum, Parallel’s recent fundraising announcement was a typewritten letter (on an Olivetti Valentine, no less) on a hand-stamped piece of paper. For a company building primarily for AI agents, the announcement authentically “touched grass.”
Each could have been made by a person with a laptop, in less time and fewer resources. But both create a visible tactile trail of evidence and a world that they’re inviting you into. The world in each is charming precisely because it was made one piece at a time, a series of “unnecessary decisions” to borrow something said by a friend recently, versus one shot via a prompt.
Maybe this is a temporary effect of our transition into a frictionless AI world… like skeuomorphism was for touch displays, or just maybe it's an early signal that viewers will increasingly value visible evidence that someone, somewhere, cared.
Let people see the labor and your fingerprints. Let the audience see the process and your intent, even if messy. Show that you spent more time than was reasonable. That you chose the longer path, to learn and grow and make with your heart and hand.