Human Made While Supplies Last

The recommended soundtrack while reading this is THE THE “This is the Day” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfAXZhzRQ6U

We're only one month into 2025, and it's already wild to realize that in past decades, we were creating an entire world built around pure human creativity. No AI assistance, no generative tools – modern cavemen making stuff with whatever we had lying around for everyone in front of the collective campfire.

Those years sedimenting into a layer cake of shared culture gave us everything from Billie Eilish whisper recording songs in her bedroom to Succession (and Industry!) capturing the zeitgeist of late-stage capitalism’s sloppy desires. Taylor touring her way into a shared storyline for humanity and Questlove’s masterful 7-minute montage archiving 50 years of SNL musical guests. We didn't just record the big moments – we compulsively snacked on all the small stuff too: viral TikTok dance challenges, BeReal posts, endless AITA Reddit posts. Without knowing it, all the brain rot and glow-ups contributed to us building the ultimate training dataset for the AI revolution.

Think about how we used to work in advertising and creative fields: WeTransfer links at 3 AM, ego-fueled Slack debates over social copy, curating mood boards on Pinterest, 14 people simultaneously working out the beautiful mess of the miserable user experience that is a Google Slides pitch deck (Figma too with its constantly buzzing flies of user names and cursors). But, you know, even our glitches were beautifully, uniquely human. There was something raw and real about it all – the good, the bland and the cringe.

Then came the Rubicon. COVID locked us indoors and online, then suddenly AI tools burst through laptop screens like the Kool-Aid Man: DALL-E making art (or at least commercially pretty images), ChatGPT writing copy, Midjourney creating a better version of whatever DALL-E made, and then after the Spaghetti-O’s litany of 4o, o1, 03, o3-mini and o1-pro mode, Deepseek showed them all up for much less money. What seemed magical in 2022 became everyday reality by 2024. Now, the first question about any creative work isn't "Is it good?" but "Did AI make this?"

This shift wont be without its costs. We'll soon see entire creative departments downsized, junior roles vanishing as AI rawdogs the grunt work, and a growing divide between those who can afford the latest AI tools and those who can't (unless Ch*na keeps open sourcing models and ironically democratizes tech access). Perhaps most concerning is how AI's ability to generate endless variations start to create a kind of sweet, Novocaine laced, smoke machine fog of creative fatigue – when everything can seem ‘perfect’, nothing stands out.

Yet paradoxically, as AI gets better at making anything and everything, purely human-made work becomes more valuable, not less. It's like how "handmade" only became special after Shein factories existed. Those imperfect Jenna Ortega Wednesday dance TikToks, and Duolingo's unhinged Twitter presence? They're cultural artifacts – valuable precisely because their inception wasn’t algorithmically optimized. The challenge now isn't just proving something is human-made, but preserving the very human impulse to create imperfectly, with “the kind of meaning that you can explain and the kind of meaning you just feel”.

By 2030 (only five years from now but it sounds so future when you put those four numbers together: 2030!), what's called TikTok now will feel as quaint as MySpace. A new generation will glide fluidly between digital personas, their lives seamlessly transforming into content we can't even imagine yet. In this hyperconnected future, authenticity will become a precious currency. The most attention-worthy won't be those who regularly Meet Cute with algorithms, but those who unapologetically embrace their 3 AM horrors and morning coffee spills, who know when to let their raw humanity sprout from the cold concrete of technology. The inspiring will be those who show and prove the messy realness of process vibes – through behind-the-scenes content, live creation sessions, and community engagement.

We're the last generation that will remember what it was like to create without AI as a partner (or editor, or art director or teacher or assistant or fixer or ghostwriter or wingman or nagging conscience). Our descendants will look back at this time with K-Drama worthy reaction shots of disbelief and romance – anemoia-tinted amazement that we made viral moments with just iPhones and imagination, built brands without a googleplex of perfectly predictive analytics, and launched campaigns based on gut feeling rather than realtime global AI-powered sentiment analysis by a swarm of simultaneous synthetic multicultural agents.

This isn’t human creativity as game show not being renewed for any more seasons. It's an opportunity for revolution instead of endless sequels and remakes.

Just like we don't miss Tumblr or Vine or dial-up internet, future creatives won't miss the limitations of pre-AI tools. But they might envy something else: the beautiful constraints that forced us to be messily, imperfectly human in our creative process.

Offered a choice between the blue pill or the red pill, the future presents creatives with a fundamental choice: stay in the familiar world of pure human expression, or dive deep into the possibilities of AI augmentation. There's no "right" choice – the kids will be alright as both paths will find themselves drawn back to study this unique moment in history, when creativity existed in its last purely human form.

Tomorrow's creators and creatives will look to our era not because it was better, but because it was the last time we enjoyed the texture of creating without digital consciousness as our companion. In a world of AI-perfected Astroglide smooth content, our human flaws and limitations might prove to be the most precious code we leave behind.

What emerges then is not only a new creative landscape, but a new value system around creativity itself. The hardest skill won't be mastering AI tools – it will be knowing when not to use them, when to let human imperfection shine through, and how to prove the authenticity that makes creativity mean something. In an infinite-compute universe of automatically hot-dog extruded sameness, humanity becomes valuable again.