Just someone licking an ice cream

TL;DR

I devalue content when I detect a machine made it, the way hand-stitched outranks factory-made. Two people I trust took the bias apart. Kedar Ravangave says consumers reject the absence of creative intelligence, not the machine. Preetham Venkky says the data shows people see the difference and do not care, they want the crux of the story. What survives: the valley lives in makers, and wherever authorship is the product. The test is not, was this made by a human. It is, did anyone actually think this.

I hold a bias and I know it is a bias, which does not make it go away. When I read something and catch the scent of a machine in it, I mark it down. Not consciously. Somewhere below that. The same paragraph, told it was written by a person, reads warmer. Told it was written by a model, it reads like furniture from a flat pack. I come from a world that prizes the hand-stitched over the factory-made, and I assumed everyone else lived there too.

So I started asking people whose judgment I trust. Not tech people. People who spend real money making things consumers actually watch. Their answers took my bias apart in two stages, and what was left standing surprised me.

The relocation

The first conversation was with Kedar Ravangave, who until this month ran marketing for Kotak Mahindra Bank, one of the sharpest brand operations in India. I asked him whether audiences punish brands for visibly AI-made content. He told me I was watching the wrong suspect.

Consumers never have a problem with how an asset is shot or shown or done. They are very forgiving of all that, as long as the message and the intent get captured. The problem is this content is being created by non-creator people, at scale, with no real creative directors bringing insight, bringing creative intelligence. That lack of creative intelligence is what consumers are rejecting. They are not rejecting the fakeness of it. They are rejecting the machine take on things. They just want the human things of it.

Kedar Ravangave, in conversation

Then he gave me a test I have not been able to put down. You could show someone licking an ice cream. What you say, in what context, with what backstory, is what humans react to. In the absence of all that, it is just someone licking an ice cream. It does not connect. And here is the part that rearranged me: shoot that same empty frame with a full crew and proper cameras and it fails identically. The valley I thought ran between human work and machine work actually runs between work with a thought in it and work without one. AI did not dig it. AI just made the thoughtless side infinitely cheap to fill.

In his telling, AI is execution. The thought is the product. The AI-made ads that are starting to win awards all have thinking in them. A creative director decoded a brief, found an insight, and used the machine the way an earlier generation used a camera. Nobody asks a great photograph whether the shutter felt anything.

The dissolution

Then I put the same question to Preetham Venkky, chief digital officer of DDB Mudra Group, who spends his days at the exact junction of creative work and platform data. Years ago he helped build this company's Singapore office, so he has earned the right to tell me things I do not want to hear. He went further than Kedar. He said the punishment I was so certain about does not exist in the data at all.

Almost fifteen percent of content right now is AI-made or AI-edited, and it has not been thrown out or deprioritised by the algorithmic platforms, because people are engaging with it. Most humans can see the difference, but they do not really care, because they are focusing on the content and not on the way the content is delivered. The craft with which content is delivered has only declined over time, and people still consume it, because they only want to get to the crux of the story.

Preetham Venkky, over WhatsApp

The audience clocks the machine and keeps scrolling.

His middle sentence took me a day to accept. My bias assumed that detecting the machine means rejecting the work. His data says detection and rejection came apart years ago. The same audience clocked the shaky vertical phone video a decade back and kept scrolling then too. Delivery craft has been losing to the crux of the story since the smartphone put a camera in every pocket. The decline of the beautifully made thing did not start with AI. AI is just its newest and cheapest chapter.

What survives

So where does that leave my bias? Not dead. Relocated, to where it always lived. The hand-stitched premium is real, but it exists mainly among people who sew. Craftsmen discount machine work because they can see the seams, and because their identity is stitched into the stitching. That is grief, and I have every sympathy for it, and the market does not share it. The consumer never paid for the seams. The consumer paid for the ice cream to mean something.

But one version of the valley survives contact with both men, and it matters commercially. It survives wherever authorship is the product. Nobody cares whether a product video was machine-made. Everybody cares whether a signed opinion, a diagnosis, a strategy has a person behind it, because in those trades the thought is the thing being bought. An essay generated by nobody is not a cheaper essay. It is an empty box. The question that decides value in the age of cheap execution is not, was this made by a human. It is, did anyone actually think this. Call it the veteran test for content.

That test cuts both ways, and the second way is uncomfortable for my tribe. Plenty of purely human content fails it. The deck assembled at midnight from last year's deck. The campaign that exists because a quarter needed a campaign. Handmade thoughtlessness has been hiding behind its handmadeness for decades. The machine, by making thoughtless content free, has stripped the alibi from all of us. When execution costs nothing, the only thing left to judge is the thought. This is the descent again, wearing a beret.

Full disclosure

These essays, for the record, are made with AI in the loop. The research is fanned out to machines, drafts come back, and the stitching is often not mine. My old bias would mark this page down for that. The argument these two men walked me through says otherwise, unless no one thought it. The bias at the top of this page is really mine. I really hold it. I really asked. The ice cream really is the test I now use. It is the test this page has to pass.

The valley between human and machine content is being crossed every day, mostly by people who never knew it was there. The valley that cannot be crossed is the one between content someone thought about and content no one did. On the right side of that one, the machines are just better sewing machines. The hand that matters was never the one holding the needle. It was the one holding the thought.