The Tamesis
For marketers, these formats offer something generative AI cannot: friction, materiality, and human presence. In this case, the “artificial” becomes a sign of status—something consumers can see, feel, and trust. As a result, community building was repositioned as a status symbol.
Even artificial intelligence companies are implementing this approach. Anthropic recently opened a pop-up store in New York’s West Village, which it describes as a “zero-slope zone,” where visitors are encouraged to disconnect, drink coffee and read a printed article from its CEO. Baseball caps emblazoned with the word “Think” were handed out — a deliberately similar gesture in the tech industry. However, entry still requires downloading the company’s artificial intelligence model Cloud, which emphasizes the complex interplay between digital innovation and physical experiences.
From AI tilt to AI normal
The current backlash against generated images has been strong, but many industry observers believe it reflects a transitional moment rather than a permanent rejection. While consumers and creatives currently criticize AI-generated campaigns—often for being derivative or aesthetically bland—the technology’s long-term trajectory may look less dramatic. Experts believe that over time, AI may fade into the background of creative workflows, becoming less of a novelty and more of an invisible infrastructure.
“I think AI will become like electricity or the Internet, except that its use is a given,” Smith said. In his view, today’s debates around generative tools reflect early technological disruptions that raised suspicion before they became standard practice. In the fashion industry, the shift to digital design software provides a useful precedent.
“Photoshop is an interesting example. If you look back at the history of fashion design, the process involved people making sketches. From those sketches, samples were made,” he explains. Designers create prototypes, edit them iteratively, and eventually narrow down these iterations into a final collection. The process, he continued, is time-consuming and often requires multiple physical samples before the final look is approved.
Digital tools are gradually changing this workflow. “Then we entered a scene where people started using Photoshop instead of sketches to create looks. This gave a more accurate representation of what the final sample would look like,” Smith continues. By allowing designers to more accurately visualize garments before making physical prototypes, the software reduces waste, speeds up development cycles, and allows creative teams to experiment more freely. From this perspective, AI may simply represent the next stage in the longer-term evolution of creative technologies. “To me, it makes perfect sense that instead of manually Photoshopping all these different looks, you could use AI to generate them based on sketches, prompts, or archival images,” he adds.
The most compelling difference in use, however, is not the algorithm itself, but the human guidance behind it. “Right now, the only way to make good AI art is to have a really tasteful person put input into the model and then provide feedback and iterate on it until it looks right,” Smith said. AI may not replace creative roles but serve primarily as a productivity tool—a way to expand experimentation while keeping aesthetic judgment firmly in human hands. “I don’t think it will replace humans in creative fields anytime soon. Instead, it will be humans using AI to enhance creativity.”
