AI Is Making Creativity Easy. Too Easy. Here's Why Human Work Will Endure.

When everything bends toward convenience, it's meaning that disappears. Here's why humanity still matters.

A photographer I know who's shot the Kardashians, Taylor Swift, and President Obama emailed me:

"I can't tell AI photos from real ones anymore."

That's when I knew we had a problem.

Jeremy Cowart is a celebrated Nashville portrait photographer who's also done global humanitarian work for the UN. In March 2023, he sent an email to his news list titled "Houston, We Have a Problem."

Even with his "very trained, professional eye," Jeremy had inadvertently mistaken AI-generated images for real photographs. It was deeply unsettling.

Cowart is a seasoned professional who has carefully shot, developed, and scrutinized tens of thousands of portraits, spending years studying the shape, expression, and unique presence of the human face.

If Jeremy Cowart can't distinguish a human photo from an AI image, who can?

Houston, we definitely have a problem.

When Everything Hit Home

Back at a café, I was telling my friend Brian about Jeremy's email. By the end of lunch, we had reached some disheartening conclusions.

"Micah, I think we're getting close to a point where it will be nearly impossible to tell what's human and what's AI: writing, visual arts, music, film, whatever," Brian said.

I frowned, imagining a world so saturated with generative content that AI quietly becomes the assumed creator behind it all.

"I think you're right," I said. "Pretty soon, the default reaction will be: AI probably made this, unless proven otherwise."

It felt plausible. Even inevitable. My conversation with Brian shook me. But it crystallized a hunch that had been nagging me for weeks.

AI isn't evil. AI is easy. And easy has a way of winning, even when it shouldn't.

Any student with ChatGPT can churn out an essay in seconds. Companies can mass-produce ad campaigns in minutes. Musicians can remix a style without touching an instrument, much less putting in the thousands of hours of concentrated practice it takes to actually master one.

If it works, it sells. And if it scales, it spreads.

But what do we lose when everything bends toward easy?

When Levi's Lost the Thread

What I didn't know yet was how quickly that hunch would be put to the test. The timing alone told a story.

On March 22, 2023 — the same day Jeremy sent his "Houston" email — Levi Strauss & Co. announced a partnership with Lalaland.ai to use AI-generated models in their online product photos, framing it as a push for diversity and inclusion.

It backfired immediately.

The irony was glaring. The company that built its name on canvas, rivets, miners, and grit now tried to solve a PR problem with an algorithm. People noticed. And they weren't having it.

Customers didn't just object to the potential job loss of models. They bristled at the idea that real connection was being replaced by simulation. Jeans are personal, they said. We don't give a damn what they look like on "virtual models." We want to see them on real people.

The lesson was clear: easy isn't always better.Sometimes, it just feels off.

A week later came the AI pause storm: Musk, Wozniak, and hundreds of tech leaders urging the world to hit the pause button on AI development. The headlines screamed apocalypse, you know, Terminator. But I wasn't worried about machines wiping out humanity. That's above my pay grade.

I was worried about something closer to home: would anyone care whether the words, images, and songs that move us were made by people at all?

The Uncanny Valley Is Gone

The impact on the visual arts has been as jarring as it has been transformative. In 2020, an AI art exhibit called "Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI" opened in San Francisco, leaving many patrons confused and disoriented. The works were hard to decode. Visitors couldn't tell what was human-made and what wasn't. Many felt bewildered, asking, "What does creativity even mean anymore?"

The exhibit borrowed its name from the "uncanny valley" — that eerie discomfort we feel when something artificial looks almost, but not quite, human. The closer the resemblance, the more unsettling the reaction.

But in hindsight, the name was more prophetic than intended. Since 2020, generative AI has advanced to the point that even experts like Jeremy Cowart can no longer distinguish between the two.

The uncanny valley isn't uncanny anymore. It's gone.

And here's the haunting part: if people can't tell, they can't care.

Economic forces tell part of the story. An AI-generated portrait sold at Christie's for $432,500 — way above its estimated value. Half a million dollars didn't go to a living, breathing artist. It went to a Paris-based tech company that ran someone else's data through a model.

The Vinyl Paradox

We've been here before.

Vinyl was supposed to die a slow, flickering death. Those of us old enough to remember watched it happen, were sad, and were also complicit. Record sales collapsed from 1.1 billion units in 1981 to under a million by 2001 — a billion-unit freefall in just two decades. Hard to even fathom.

Vinyl disappeared for one simple reason: people got mobile. People wanted their music anywhere, everywhere, on demand, no hassle.

The problem is that vinyl record players are homebodies, happiest on flat, solid ground. The hair-thin needle, nestled in a spinning micro-groove, was delicate. One heavy footstep and the record skipped. You can't take records on vacation. You can't play them in the car. You can't take them to the beach or on a run.

Cassettes and CDs let us carry music everywhere. Then came the digital revolution. I can still see Steve Jobs on stage in 2001, holding up an iPod: "1,000 songs in your pocket." Why pay ten dollars for an album when you only liked three songs?

By the early 2000s, vinyl was all but dead. Like home-cooked meals edged out by TV dinners, the messy, meaningful experiences got replaced by frictionless convenience.

And yet vinyl came back. Why?

What was once a quirky collector's item has made a billion-dollar resurgence. Even people under thirty — kids who grew up with Spotify — are buying records.

Maybe it's because vinyl offers something digital can't. The weight of the sleeve. The fading cover art. The dust, the scratches, the hiss and crackle. The ritual of lowering the needle. Closing your eyes and just listening. Imperfection becomes part of the experience. It's slower, more fragile, and more limited — but somehow more real. You have to stay with a record, flip it after 22 minutes to get what's on the other side. It demands something of you: your presence.

The vinyl paradox is simple: convenience was gained, meaning was lost. And now people are giving up convenience to get meaning back again.

That paradox raises the question at the center of our AI age: If machines can generate endless words, images, and songs at the speed of a prompt, will people begin to crave the slower, stranger, more intentional work of humans?

Tilt: The Human Ingredient

That's where the vinyl analogy gets deeper. Records don't just sound different from digital — they carry something invisible that streaming can't replicate.

My close friend and mentor, Klaus, is an eighty-something survivor of Nazi Germany, a world-class engineer, and a spectacular chef. To me, he's the Ernest Hemingway of my circle — a brilliant generalist with a thousand fascinating stories.

Klaus is also a true music lover. Not long ago, we got to talking about the difference between hearing a digital recording and listening to vinyl. Then he told me two stories I'll never forget.

The first was about watching Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone sing "New York, New York" live on black-and-white TV. Different shows, different nights, same song. They both belted out the same iconic lyrics about how wonderful the city was, with the Bronx uptown and the Battery downtown.

But the performances couldn't have felt more different.

Sinatra and Damone each brought something personal: their own distinct tone, subtle phrasing, even the way they carried themselves onstage — their energy, their presence, their facial expressions. And the context shaped it too: the audience, the moment, the unspoken signals of the era — all the other things that couldn't be reduced to the notes on the page.

Klaus's second story was about two world-class pianists: Lang Lang and Yuja Wang. Both are known for their breathtaking, near-flawless technique. Klaus has heard them play the same classical piece, and although the score was the same, the experience could not have been more different.

If the sheet music was the blueprint, Lang and Wang started building from the same foundation. But they finished their spaces in entirely different ways — Lang's felt like a New York concert hall: solid, grounded, richly layered. Wang's felt more like a glass pavilion in Singapore: fluid, intricate, flooded with light. Same composition, but worlds apart for the listener.

Why is that?

Tilt.

When humans create and share work, everyone's tilt comes into play: the creator's, the performer's, the listener's. Tilt is that invisible lean of personality, presence, and perspective that seeps into everything you touch. It's the bend in phrasing, the surge in energy, the unwritten pause that changes how something lands — and how it lives in someone's memory.

And it's never neutral, even when the structure stays the same.

Tilt doesn't work alone. Time and setting tilt the experience too. A song on a massive stage feels different than the same song in a living room, on a sidewalk, or in a studio with perfect acoustics. The backdrop matters. The crowd matters. The mood of the moment tilts everything.

You can't always measure the impact of lighting, sound, costumes, or scenery. No two performances are ever the same. Culture moves. Audiences shift. A work that stirs hearts in one decade might fall flat, or even be offensive, in another.

Creative reception is never fixed. It moves because people move.

And creative work — no matter who or what makes it — will always have one primary audience: people.

We don't make songs for machines. Machines don't make songs for other machines. The audience has always been human. And it still is.

When Shibuya Just Works

In the heart of Tokyo sits one of the world's most mesmerizing feats of urban choreography: Shibuya Crossing.

Every three minutes, more than 2,500 people flood into the intersection from twelve different directions, somehow moving through the chaos without colliding. I've watched it unfold several times over the years, usually from the second floor of the Starbucks that overlooks the sprawl, coffee in hand, captivated every time the light changes.

To fully appreciate it, let me give you a bit of context:

First, Japanese pedestrians don't jaywalk. Unlike in New York, São Paulo, or Paris, people in Tokyo wait for the walk signal, even when there's no traffic in sight. That might sound like a generalization, but in Tokyo, it's almost universally true.

Second, they move politely, efficiently, and with focus. They don't hesitate, but they don't barrel through, either. Each person picks a line and walks it. There is no pushing, no chaos — just a purposeful flow.

But with more than 2,500 pedestrians moving through the same small space, headed in every direction, there's a ton of split-second adjusting, shuffling, and polite sidestepping to make the dance work for everyone.

Third, the crossing light only stays green for forty seconds. That's it. Forty seconds to get thousands of people from one side to the other across forty meters of ground, without incident. And when the light turns red again, miraculously, everybody's made it to the other side.

It works every time.

Shibuya looks like it shouldn't function: six roads, twelve angles, thousands of destinations. There is no conductor, no visible control. But instead of disorder, we get grace. No one approaching the crossing thinks, "This is impossible. I'll never make it across." They trust the system. They trust each other. Then they move.

What unfolds is a kind of unspoken choreography: human-scaled, adaptive, imperfect, and alive. Shibuya wasn't designed once and left alone. It evolved over 150 years, shaped by commuters, crowds, and constant motion. It's a living system now: too complex to reverse, too trusted to replace.

That's what human creativity looks like at its best: messy but alive, not optimized by code but lived by instinct. AI might simulate the pattern, but it can't do the lived dance.

Why Humans Are the New Vinyl

Every generation has faced a technological nemesis: the printing press, the camera, the internet. Each time, we traded something meaningful for something efficient. Each time, we asked the same questions: What have we gained? What have we lost? Do we still recognize ourselves on the other side?

Here's what history shows: disruption is inevitable. Resistance is natural. Adaptation is where we survive.

Vinyl records survived because they carried something digital could not: scarcity, tactility, lived presence. Humans will survive for the same reason. Not because we're faster, but because we're real.

We don't just create for output. We create to connect.To share a tilt. To leave a mark.

Klaus's stories remind us that creativity is the sum of many parts: inspiration, creation, emotion, interpretation, presentation, nuance, time and place, and the audience's relationship to it all. AI can process vast amounts of data and generate outputs that appear and sound remarkably realistic. But the human touch — immeasurable as it may be — still makes all the difference.

And in an age when AI can mimic almost everything, that human signature becomes more valuable, not less.

This moment feels like the early days of vinyl's comeback. AI has arrived fast. People are still figuring out how to feel about it. Some don't care. Some feel uneasy. A few say hell no.

But beneath it all is a quiet recognition: in a world where anyone can generate a song, a story, or an image, the work shaped by lived experience, emotional truth, and intentional craft will matter more — like vinyl records in the streaming age: scarce, fragile, imperfectly human.

Artificial intelligence has become a global intersection: billions of people, thousands of systems, and a handful of hyper-powerful players converge all at once. We need systems built on shared trust and the willingness to adapt as we go. That's what makes a system human. Not the tech. The people in motion. The instinct to move forward together, even without guarantees.

Which brings us back to Jeremy's email and that café conversation with Brian. If AI makes creativity easy — too easy — why choose harder, slower, more human ways?

Because human is the new vinyl.

This piece is adapted from my book Human Is the New Vinyl. If you want to hang with these ideas in a deeper way, you can find it here on Amazon.

It's my attempt to trace what's really at stake in an AI age: not speed or slickness, but what makes us human.

If this stirred something in you, I'd love for you to share it.

lnʞsʇᴉɹɐɹoʌ ɥɐɔᴉɯ ⬢

Micah is the author of Human Is the New Vinyl and founder of VerifiedHuman™. He writes and works at the messy intersection of technology, creativity, and being human.