For marketers, these formats offer what generative AI cannot: friction, materiality, and human presence. In this landscape, ‘human-made’ becomes a marker of status — something consumers can see, feel, and trust. As a result, community-building is being repositioned as a status symbol.
Even AI companies are operationalizing this approach. Anthropic recently opened a pop-up in New York’s West Village, which it described as a “Zero Slop Zone”, encouraging visitors to disconnect from their devices, drink coffee, and read a printed essay by its CEO. Baseball caps emblazoned with the word “thinking” were distributed — a deliberately analogue gesture within a highly technical industry. Entry, however, still required downloading the company’s AI model, Claude, underscoring the complex interplay between digital innovation and physical experience.
From AI slop to AI as ordinary
The current backlash against generative imagery has been intense, but many industry observers believe it reflects a transitional moment rather than a permanent rejection. While consumers and creatives are currently criticizing AI-generated campaigns — often for being derivative or aesthetically flat — the technology’s long-term trajectory may look less dramatic. Over time, experts argue, AI will likely fade into the background of creative workflows, becoming less of a novelty and more of an invisible infrastructure.
“I feel like AI is going to become like electricity or the internet, where it’s just a given that it’s used,” says Smith. In his view, the debate surrounding generative tools today mirrors earlier technological disruptions, which provoked skepticism before becoming standard practice. Within fashion, the shift toward digital design software provides a useful precedent.
“Photoshop is an interesting example. If you think about fashion design historically, the process involved people making sketches. From those sketches, samples would be made,” he explains. Designers would produce prototypes, edit them repeatedly, and eventually narrow those iterations down into a final collection. The process was time-intensive and often required multiple physical samples before a final look was approved, he continues.
Digital tools gradually altered that workflow. “Then, we moved into a scenario where people began using Photoshop rather than sketches to create looks. That allowed for a much more accurate representation of what the final sample would look like,” Smith continues. By enabling designers to visualize garments more precisely before producing physical prototypes, the software reduced waste, accelerated development cycles, and allowed creative teams to experiment more freely. From that perspective, AI may simply represent the next stage in a longer evolution of creative technology. “To me, it makes total sense that instead of manually Photoshopping all those different looks you could use AI to generate them based on sketches, prompts, or archival imagery,” he adds.
What distinguishes the most compelling uses, however, is not the algorithm itself but the human direction behind it. “At the moment, the only way to make good AI art is to have a human with really good taste feeding inputs into the model, then providing feedback and iterating on it until it looks right,” Smith says. Rather than replacing creative roles, AI may function primarily as a productivity tool — a way to expand experimentation while leaving aesthetic judgement firmly in human hands. “I don’t think it’s going to replace humans in the creative sphere anytime soon. Instead, it’s going to be about humans harnessing AI to increase their creativity.”
