In the hours leading up to Lady Gaga’s latest album release, a video appeared on social media of the pop star’s face, depicted as a lit candle, slowly melting into perfect lines of wax. The internet still isn’t sure whether it was created by AI or CGI, and Apple Music, which posted it, hasn’t clarified in either direction. 

But it almost doesn’t matter. 

As influencer and activist Matt Bernstein wrote on X: “AI is recalibrating consumer taste levels in real time. Five years ago, I would’ve thought this was so cool, but now it immediately looks like cheap shit.” 

The response was vastly different from when graphic designer Brian Roettinger made a Kesha-shaped candle using a 3D scan of her head. A photo of the lit candle, her face dripping down in imperfect streams of wax, was the cover art for the pop star’s 2020 album. It was cool back then, and it is cool now. But that’s only because it clearly had a human process. We could see it with our own eyes. 

We’ve started second-guessing everything that looks too perfect. The meaning once instilled in an image is no longer a given. (Remember when a picture was worth a thousand words?) And as investor and designer Willem Van Lancker once wrote, when images become untrustworthy, “the burden shifts to the maker to demonstrate intent and authenticity.” 

It’s no longer enough to have a great idea and execute it impeccably; you have to prove it was you who actually created it. 

As a result, many brands are resorting to what social media expert Rachel Karten calls “proof of reality” posts, or, as she puts it in her Link in Bio newsletter, “the polite way of saying ‘AI could never.’” This genre of proof-of-humanity or proof-of-effort content is now unmissable on social media. 

When Google released its Mother’s Day Doodle, a crafty take on a Mother’s Day card, it was accompanied by a video showing the intricate process of creating it, which included tracing around a young child’s hand. 

For Apple, this is an integrated strategy that spans product lines and aims to represent the brand’s inherent values. With its TV logo revamp, the company shared the real glass cutouts used to create the prism au naturel. It also backed up its MacBook Neo launch video with another film featuring animated, handmade miniatures. 

Many attribute this shift to AI (including me, just four paragraphs ago). Although the quickly advancing technology is clearly an accelerant, it’s not the only cause. 

Our creative outputs have long been optimized. We post for the algorithm, not our audience, so success hinges on fitting into a specific formula. You don’t have to be a social media expert to know what kind of post performs well, because your entire feed is filled with iterations of the same few templates. 

The Value of Waste

The final product was already devalued before AI became near-undetectable. In its 2024 Hyper-Optimization manifesto, the Office of Applied Strategy (OAS) wrote: “Under the allure of cultural abundance, society has begun to enter a period of cultural stagnation. Despite the amount of culture surrounding us, it increasingly feels like an iterative repetition of something we’ve already seen before, disguised as newness.”

Efficiency was the highest consideration, so creativity gets treated like a waste product: no need to expend that effort unnecessarily. But, as OAS founder Tony Wang asked Matt Klein in an interview, “Why not make waste a luxury?” 

The Hyper-Optimization Manifesto was originally delivered in a paper-only edition, by hand, to select individuals. Its scarcity caused it to become a sought-after object; one was sold on GRAILED for $100. In an age where text and PDFs can be generated with ease, physical editions are proof of work.

This is exactly what’s happening now. It’s quicker, easier, and more efficient to generate a bespoke image through Midjourney. In a hyper-optimized world, that’s the dream. But now, consumers are demanding more. They want to see the “wasted time” brands have spent on human creativity, from ideation to iteration, drafting, revision, and completion. That effort is what makes something worth engaging with, especially as so many tools, apps, and media fight for our attention. 

“The interesting trend is we're putting in unnecessary human work in a time where synthetic content is saturating culture,” Future Commerce CEO Phillip Jackson said on the 2026 predictions episode of the podcast. There’s no “taking the easy way out.”

And in many cases now, the process of creating something is more impressive than the final output, which makes it a marketing asset in and of itself. A recent New York Times opinion piece by technology writer Jasmine Sun was accompanied by an image of a rickety ladder poking through a hole in the ceiling of a dark room, opening up into a bright blue sky. 

The image and the metaphor behind it were charmingly apt. But the craft behind it, which required building a real, miniature ladder and then mounting it beneath a printout of the sky, elevated the artwork to somewhere far more impressive. Going through that lengthy process and then sharing it as artistic lore is now the point. It’s how images recapture meaning and become something worth saving, sharing, and referring back to over time.

At minimum, this kind of process sharing evokes the effort heuristic: you value something more because you can see the time and effort that went into producing it. But it’s arguably more than that. Walter Benjamin wrote about “aura,” an almost mystical quality that gave art its meaning, and this evokes a similar energy. 

In his 1929 essay Little History of Photography, Benjamin describes aura as “a strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be.” To reproduce or copy something was to “bring it closer,” removing its uniqueness and impact. I doubt Benjamin would deign to connect anything on the internet with “aura.” To him, even Dadaist works “ruthlessly annihilat[ed]” it. But these process posts do pull the content back into the real world, and therefore back to the original creative act.

The Allure of the Real World 

This goes beyond brands. Photographers are taking rolls of film and boiling them with herbs. Designers are making their own fonts out of toothpaste, while artists are scanning their body parts to create textures. Scanners have become an essential tool, from standard models to portable stick scanners, because it’s not good enough to find a photograph, or even take one yourself. You need to pull your creative from the real world. When the US government released its UFO report, filled with rough-and-ready textures and fonts, social media heralded it as the greatest thing to happen for graphic designers in years. 

Creative processes are becoming longer and more intricate, incorporating real-world objects to ensure there’s enough visible effort. When the value of your final piece hinges on how it was made, you need to make sure there’s a good story to be told. As influencer Var Aunevik said in a recent Reel: 

“The ‘making of’ is becoming the marketing.” And, more than that, it signals luxury. “The process is the new premium.”

Porsche’s animated holiday ad was hand-drawn and rendered, with eight easter eggs hidden throughout. The brand was basically begging viewers to focus on the film’s details. Artisan perfume-makers Ffern consistently release behind-the-scenes footage of the films accompanying each scent. “We feel there’s something about seeing how a film is made that highlights those realities, and cuts through all the fakery that’s out there at the moment,” Ffern’s co-founder Emily Cameron told It’s Nice That. 

Proving human provenance is the base requirement. For example, brands like Le Creuset have started listing all the creators behind the content in their social media captions. But, as Jackson explained on that same predictions podcast episode, “the trust layers over what is human has become table stakes.” Going deeper into the process suggests higher quality and status.

There’s historical context for this in the Arts and Crafts Movement, which emerged after the Industrial Revolution mechanized the production of books, furniture, and textiles. Artisans came together to add humanity back into the process, from the human tooling marks to the hand-stitched signatures. In a manifesto, Walter Crane, illustrator and key player of the movement, wrote: 

“Art is, in its true sense, after all, the crown and flowering of life and labour, and we cannot reasonably expect to gain that crown except at the true value of the human life and labour of which it is the result.” 

Crane’s complaint was similar to OAS’s; the need for efficiency had resulted in the flattening of culture. Only by connecting back to the source of the object, ensuring there was value within the process by which it was made, could that “crown” be restored. 

Artists, at the employ of brands, carry on a new tradition of Arts and Crafts, but in the service of digital commerce. In 2026, Hermès redesigned its website around the hand-drawn artwork of French artist Linda Merad amid criticisms and online disinformation campaigns that its goods, specifically their high-end handbags, were produced by third-party manufacturers in China and Vietnam.

Human-Washing 

Of course, with process content now becoming a marketing trend, there’s a chance that AI will inevitably co-opt it. 

“The setup vs the shot” posts have become a new Instagram trend. They feature the process and the product side by side, illustrating the messy realities of the creative process. They’ve become so popular that there’s already an entire new genre satirizing them. The “how we made this” videos show an incredibly hectic, low-budget process, and the resulting shot is also a mess.

But there’s a bigger problem than comedic commentary muddying our algorithms filled with creative purity. We’re seeing AI tools being used to replicate the low-fi, hand-drawn techniques that gained popularity in opposition to the ultra-clean lines of AI. How long will it take for AI to master “anti-slop design” components like textural collages? 

Slop has already come for behind-the-scenes content created by the film industry. On his blog, sound technician Joseph Sardin lists multiple examples of AI-generated, “never-before-seen, making-of videos” for many classics, from Jaws to Titanic. They’re easy to spot at the moment — boom poles are hovering unaided, camera lenses are replaced with screens, mics sit underwater — but these AI tells won’t be around forever. 

Perhaps brands will have to prove their no-AI credentials in the same way they’ve had to prove other social or environmental claims: by having journalists disproving lies about human-washed creative the same way they’ve done with performative marketing and greenwashing. Or perhaps, by the time these process posts have lost their AI immunity, our tastes will shift again, moving onto another creative obsession. 

Until then, the process is the product. And it’s up to brands to show off what they’re really trying to sell.