The human touch

Remember the Numa Numa guy? That gloriously ridiculous lip-sync video from the early days of YouTube was not technically impressive. It was just intensely human. Compare it to this month's "ballerina cappuccino" AI videos: technically stunning and forgotten within hours. One came from a person so entirely himself that millions could not look away. The other is novelty, and novelty wears thin.

Sari Azout has the right idea: stop calling it artificial intelligence. It is collective intelligence, a way of tapping everything humans have ever written, painted or thought. Using it is not cheating; it is collaborating with the accumulated work of the species. Imagine Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez in the room, ready to brainstorm. The value is not in their presence but in what you do with what they say.

Craft and tricks.

AI has produced two camps. In one, people crank out generic LinkedIn posts, cookie-cutter logos and an endless supply of ballerina cappuccinos, having confused output with outcome. In the other, people use AI the way a master craftsperson uses a tool: with intention, judgment and a recognizably human point of view. A hand-letterer does not pick up a pen and produce magic. They develop taste, learn when to break the rules, and put personality into every stroke. AI craft works the same way.

Youngme Moon's phrase for it is "intensely human", and it is not corporate speak but a survival strategy. When anyone can generate decent content, being recognizably yourself is the only moat left. Casey Neistat's vlogs are technically imperfect and unmistakable, because of the manic energy and the curiosity. David Chang's cooking shows are not polished food television; they are raw enthusiasm for flavor and process. Simone Giertz's "shitty robots" are deliberately useless inventions that reveal her in every malfunction. Each could be imitated by a machine and none could be replaced by one, because their humanity is the point. If you do not know these people, look them up; it is time well wasted.

Azout's test is a good one: strip away the byline, and would people still know this came from you? Does it carry your lived experience, your odd obsessions, your particular way of seeing? Most AI-generated content fails the test spectacularly. It is smooth, competent and completely forgettable, the written equivalent of lift music.

What the sanding was for.

When I was doing my Master of Design at the Institute of Design in Chicago, a professor made us apply plaka to illustration board with painstaking precision, sand it smooth, and then hand-letter in Univers. This seemed absurd. There was a Mac in the corner that could do the whole thing instantly, and we all knew it. But the tedious process forced us to think about every stroke, every letter space, every decision. The Mac could produce faster. It could not make us consider why we were making the thing at all.

New tools always seduce us into believing we can produce without thinking. Creativity of the kind that makes people think and feel demands the opposite: deep consideration of the tools and how we use them. With AI the craft has a few baseline elements. Curating context, so the machine has something meaningful to work with rather than a pile of random references. Learning the language that unlocks what you actually want, which takes practice like any craft. Developing the eye to spot the one percent of output with real potential, and knowing how to shape it. Treating first attempts as sketches, because the craft is in the revision. Knowing what is worth making at all, since the bottleneck is no longer capability but judgment. And bringing your baggage: your experience, biases and obsessions are features, not bugs, and they are what make your work impossible to copy. The craft also has to keep evolving with the tool. You scan the horizon while you dig like hell.

You are not competing with AI. You are competing with people who use it better than you do, and the ones winning are not the prompt engineers but the ones with something to say. While others chase the latest model or optimization trick, the irreplaceable things are your taste, your willingness to be wrong, and your willingness to be intensely, unapologetically yourself. The future belongs to the people who can make collective intelligence feel personal, and they will be the ones who are most themselves rather than the most technical.

The ballerina cappuccino will be gone by next week. The Numa Numa guy is still with us twenty years later. Be the Numa Numa guy.