“Weird”
The execution bar just collapsed. Anyone with a browser and twenty minutes can generate something that looks, from a distance, like design. This is the fact we're living with now.
What nobody tells you is that this changes everything — and almost nothing.
What becomes genuinely scarce when competence is cheap is judgment. Knowing what's worth making. Knowing when to stop. Knowing the difference between a solution and the right solution. That's not a skill you acquire in a weekend course. It accumulates over years, over bad decisions made on deadline, over the slow education of seeing what holds up and what doesn't.
The designers getting hired right now aren't necessarily the most technically proficient. They're the ones who can walk into a room with something half-formed, make a fuzzy problem legible, and know exactly what to cut.
Brands spent $8 million per 30 seconds, then cut corners on the thing that actually matters. Viewers responded with words like "weird," "surreal," and "WTF."
This year's Super Bowl just made the case for us. Twenty-three percent of commercials featured AI in some form. Brands spent $8 million per 30 seconds, then cut corners on the thing that actually matters. Viewers responded with words like "weird," "surreal," and "WTF." Discussions called the ads "emblematic of declining creative effort" — a comparison some drew to the Dot-Com Bowl of 2000, when the bubble burst before the year was out.
Merriam-Webster named slop its word of 2025. It felt earned. Consumers feel it. Brands feel it. There's a real hunger for work that actually means something — work with a point of view behind it.
The robots are extraordinary at making more. They're genuinely terrible at making it matter. This year, 125 million people felt the difference, even if they couldn't name it.
I'm curious whether you think brands will course-correct — or double down. My instinct is we haven't seen the bottom yet.
