There’s an excellent Substack post by Kevin Kelly called “Better Than Free” that’s been rattling around my head for a minute.
His argument is simple: in a world where perfect copies are free and instant, the things people will still pay for are the things that can’t be copied. He calls them generatives: qualities like interpretation, authenticity, embodiment, and personalization. They’re the human elements that become increasingly valuable as everything else becomes easier to reproduce.
A thought keeps occurring to me: AI is becoming incredibly good at producing competent first drafts, which only raises the value of the things that aren’t first drafts.
The question isn’t whether AI can build a website or generate marketing copy. Of course it can. The better question is: what, now, requires judgment?
Here are the five ideas from Kelly’s essay that struck me most:
Interpretation: Making Sense of the Noise
Kelly points out that software may be free, but the manual will always be what’s valuable. A code snippet may be easy to copy, for example, but understanding what to do with it isn’t. When I have my website hat on, that’s more or less my entire job.
Today, anyone can generate a marketing plan in seconds, so what’s scarce now isn’t the output. It’s knowing which output is the correct play for a business, its goals, and its audience.
I’ve spent decades designing for print and the web, and I still learn new tools every week because the landscape is ever-changing. (It’s long been true that the new skill is learning new skills.) So I’m not about resisting technology. I’m about understanding when to use it and how to translate an overwhelming number of possibilities into decisions that actually move a business forward.
Personalization: Average is Easier than Ever
What’s cool: Everyone can now generate content in seconds.
What’s not cool: Everyone can tell.
Generative content is the Internet’s toupee.
Not because AI is bad, just because it’s optimized to produce something that looks plausible, competent, and familiar. But also, usually, very bland. Businesses, on the other hand, succeed by expressing what makes them different.
The oldest rule in the marketing book still applies, and will always apply:
Differentiate or die!
These days the value is in discovering what makes your organization unlike anyone else’s and building your messaging around that. That requires conversation, curiosity, iteration. In one sense, it’s less a marketing problem than a business problem. Either way, it can’t be automated because it doesn’t exist until people create it together.
My favorite AI test is to ask it to tell me a joke on a topic. Try it. Ask ChatGPT or Claude: “Tell me five short jokes about marriage.“ AI will never tell you a joke you haven’t heard 50 times before.
- Marriage is the only subscription service where cancelling requires lawyers.
- Marriage teaches compromise. Mostly over where the thermostat should be.
- Marriage is a partnership. You handle half, and she handles whichever half she wants. [Surprise: Claude’s jokes are explicitly sexist.]
- Before marriage, he talks and she listens. After marriage, she talks and he listens. [Claude again. Bruh!]
This is what the laziest comedians do. To my eye, all AI-generated design looks like this sounds.
Authenticity: Experience Builds Trust
Authenticity is the feeling customers get when there’s genuine experience behind your work.
Good clients don’t hire designers because they can produce pixels. They hire them because they trust their judgment. That trust comes from years of solving problems, making mistakes, learning what works.
AI can summarize. It can’t live life and accumulate its own experience. It may be able to replicate insight but it doesn’t have intuition. It can recapitulate historical moments but it can’t respond to the moment.
Embodiment: The Value of the Real
Kelly argues that as digital copies become more abundant physical experiences become more valuable.
I’ve owned a Kindle for years. Barely ever use it. I really enjoy holding a paperback. I love marking passages and folding down corners of pages that spoke to me. For me, the experience is fundamentally different.
I don’t think those impulses are going away. I’d say most of us are feeling that they’ve already become more important. Gen Z has discovered vinyl. Unplugging is the new wealth and digital detox is quiet luxury.
As our screens fill up with frictionless AI content, people are going to crave experiences that are tangible, real and memorable. For businesses, that could mean clever print pieces that people keep or hang, packaging worth holding onto, an in-person event, or the low key reassurance there’s an actual human being behind the service they want to work with.
Findability: Great Work Isn’t Enough
It never was. Beethoven had a patron. The Great Gatsby was a flop that became “the great American novel” after the U.S. Army printed 150,000 free copies for soldiers in World War II. Modern Art had the CIA stuffing Benjamins in its pocket.
Kelly’s final point is that a price of zero doesn’t get you found, and neither does quality by itself.
As AI makes it easy for millions of businesses to produce competent websites and marketing campaigns, attention and credibility become scarcer.
Marketing isn’t decoration applied after the work is finished. It’s what gives the work a chance to succeed. Founders know this. Founders are said to spend 20% of their time working in their business and 80% of their time working on their business.
Marketing is the patron of profit. You can build something remarkable, but if nobody discovers it and nobody trusts it, that quality never gets a chance to matter.
None of this makes AI the enemy. I use AI most days because I’d be foolish not to. It speeds up research, helps me explore ideas and, like a good intern, often produces a serviceable first draft.
And that’s exactly the point. The easier it becomes to make something, the more valuable it becomes to know what should be made, and then how to make it stand apart from everything else.
If that’s the kind of thinking you’re looking for, I’d be happy to have a conversation.