Work with soul is winning

The more I look around, the more I see audiences pushing back against work that feels ‘fast-tracked.’

For a minute there, it felt like we were all staring at an inevitable future where speed and volume were the only metrics that mattered. But people can tell when something was made carelessly. They feel it. They reject it. I’m sensing a growing hunger for craft, care, and perspective. And that’s great news for anyone who still gives a shit about only populating the world with beautiful things.

I’ve been thinking about this since I listened to Rosalía’s album LUX, the body of work that reminds the world that classical music is the O.G. I think about those strings on an hourly basis.

In her interview with Zane Lowe, she talks with conviction about the specific beauty of the sound of wood, brass, and humans. She wanted every sound to come from a person. Even the loops aren’t looped. It’s gorgeous, emotional, and transports you to a mental state I haven’t felt from a record in years (or ever? I don’t know). She brought 13 languages, a world-class orchestra, and deep storytelling to the mainstream, just when we needed it the most.

Watching her, I’m just like: what the fuck are we all doing?

She puts the rest of the world’s ‘creatives’ to shame. She has set the bar sky-high, and I am here for it. Because when you look at the alternative, the contrast is stark.1

Take this years Coca-Cola ad. This is the single case study that proves AI isn’t the time-saving shortcut to brilliance non-practitioners think it is. I’ve felt this pressure myself — the misconception that because we can open an app and pump in a prompt, a three-month job should now take three days. It’s totally false. Sometimes I just end up in this endless feed of prompts and I realise I could have spent that time doing it myself, using the skills I’ve been honing my whole career.

Reports say the Coke ad took close to 70,000 individual prompts and a couple of months to pull together. And the result? Unwatchable slop. They took a precious, iconic ad that opens the festive season for families around the world and handled it with real carelessness. Was this the result of an exec riding the waves of the AI-soaked Cannes, wanting to be the first to do an AI ad? Or budget cuts? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. All that matters at the end of the day is that the output is just bad, and the world really deserves better.

We saw it again with that viral TikTok track, ‘I RUN’ by Haven. One week, people were saying “inject this song straight into my veins.” The next, it was outed as Suno’s AI warping a male producer’s voice to sound painfully close to Jorja Smith. Jorja confirmed it wasn’t her, and the track was torn down.

The fascinating thing is, the song was actually good. It was produced by an up-and-coming producer. But the simple fact that there was no vocalist credited — that it was seen as deception — killed it. It’s not allowed on streaming platforms, and now it’s gone from TikTok. The craft was there in the production, but the soul was missing from the performance.

Then you look at something like the new Apple TV opening ident.

In business terms, the effort is totally unnecessary. It’s five seconds long. But it is a totally necessary statement about Apple’s stance on craft and creation. You watch it, and you know a team of super-talented people poured years of expertise into those few seconds. It’s felt. The impact is immeasurable because it acts as a signal: We care about this. We care about our audience.

It seems for a while now, efficiency has been the ultimate goal. But audiences are proving that they value the struggle. They value the “unnecessary” effort.

Rosalía proves it. The rejection of the Coca-Cola ad proves it.

I think what we’re witnessing is a correction. The sad acceptance of mediocrity is starting to fade, and the appreciation for high-effort, human work is coming back into focus. If you are willing to do things the hard way, to focus on the craft and the story rather than the shortcut, you are winning.

My hot take right now: Human creativity isn’t going anywhere.

This doesn’t mean AI will become irrelevant — of course it won’t. But it does mean the immediate seduction we experienced from what these models could do is, in fact, not enough. Of course, it’s impressive. But shortcutting is not enough, and it never will be.