When I was a boy I got my first video camera — the kind with a zoom. And I did what every kid does with a new technology, e.g., superpower. I zoomed. In and out, in and out, all afternoon, certain I was making something brilliant.

I wasn't making something. I was making people nauseous.

The camera handed me a capability, and I mistook the capability for the art. I thought the new thing I could do was the thing worth doing.

Are we repeating this — at scale?

Moving Wallpaper

Coca-Cola, arguably the greatest marketing company in history, ran an AI-made holiday ad last Christmas. You probably won't remember it, and that is the point.

Spectacularly produced (with AI). Technically flawless (with AI). And completely empty (with AI).

Moving wallpaper. Nobody in the process ever had something at stake to say, so the thing does everything an ad can do except the one thing that was always the point: mean something.

They boasted how much money they saved. I would suggest they focus on how much money they wasted.

I dare you to look at some of the past Coca-Cola ads to see the difference. They were genius. "Teach the World to Sing." They invented Santa Claus for God's sake.

The Ghibli Week

Last year Sam Altman turned the internet into a mockery of genius — the internet spent a week turning selfies into Studio Ghibli frames, delighted, convinced it was making art.

We mocked a genius and an entire nation like idiots. And the worst part: I don't think Altman ever even knew.

The machine reproduced the style perfectly and couldn't touch the only thing that made it worth having.

All great storytelling is character development. Character development is interiority changing under stakes — which is precisely the thing a machine cannot do, because nothing has ever cost it anything.

The Real Loss

Think about our current trajectory with GenAI: we are doing more of the same thing, more and more of the same thing, making things bigger and bigger. And using our creativity to raise capital and fool the markets.

So we can now generate infinite surface. Flawless, instant, free. And in doing it we've stripped the surface clean off the thing that gave it meaning, held it up to the light, and called it creation.

We haven't lost the plot to the machines.

We've lost it to ourselves — the moment we decided the measurable was the valuable, and forgot to ask what the measurement was ever for.

Stephen Klein is Founder & CEO of Curiouser.AI, a Reflective AI company. He teaches "Marketing in the Age of AI" at UC Berkeley Extension and writes about the intersection of capital, institutions, and technology. His forthcoming book, The Rogue Entrepreneur, is under development with Georgetown University Press. Curiouser.AI is the only AI designed to augment human intelligence. Curiouser is community-funded on WeFunder.