AI has ushered in an incredible boom in polish.
Suddenly, everyone with access to an internet-connected device can create work that is as polished and professional in appearance as those with years of experience learning the ins and outs of their profession and the tools they used to create that work.
This push for polish started even before AI became widespread. Look no further than Instagram or TikTok to see the same general idea. Everyone—well, not everyone of course, but certainly those at the top of the Influencer heap—is sharing the best version of their life with the help of filters to brighten up the blue sky and remove any hint of blemish from their person.
Before AI and the proliferation of professional tools that are easier to use and more accessible (Photoshop, GarageBand, and the sort), polish represented something. It meant there had been real time and effort paid to the output. It meant that the people who produced it had spent, likely, years and countless hours honing their craft to bring you that piece. Now, that polished song you heard, essay you read, or video your mom sent you on Facebook for some reason… might have been produced by an AI with a basic prompt.
The Age of Poison
As an elder Millennial, I think the best analog I can think of here is that we’re living in the age of Poison.
Big, polished, professional, theatrical.
The sound of Hair Metal defined the 80s much the way that filters and AI polish have dominated the aesthetics of our current era.
But then Nirvana happened.
It turned out that the era of excess was gestating its own opposition.
No more big hair and spandex. No more theatre. We wanted something that felt ‘real.’ Torn jeans, Chuck Taylors, a worn cardigan, and visceral angst.
To be clear, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” absolutely changed the look and feel of the 90s seemingly overnight, but it also peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 while “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred reached #1 just four weeks later. Nothing, not even the overnight takeover of Grunge, is without its complications.
Polish was still popular, but perhaps its abundance is exactly what ushered in the era of Grunge. The polish ceased to be a meaningful metric against which to judge the output.
Taste is pretty cyclical. Not exactly, but as the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Are we on the verge of ushering in another Grunge era? Maybe. I imagine it would only make sense if the kids coming of age in the era of pixel-perfect everything start to push back. Refusing to use filters, rejecting letting AI write their papers or produce their songs.
The Corgan Method
As hair metal gave way to grunge, the popular tastes switched from polish to “authentic,” under the assumption that polish was inherently inauthentic. Then there were The Smashing Pumpkins. The Pumpkins were, and remain, polished grunge. When the market said trying too hard was for sellouts and poseurs, Billy Corgan pushed the band and label to release a concept double album that would eventually become an opera.
When ironic detachment was the standard of the day, Billy implored us to “double cross the vacant and the bored,” and to “crucify the insincere,” while lamenting that his own success was being used against him when the record label insisted he write some big sweeping anthem.
So we have ahead of us three possible trajectories:
- Continued polish, with likely diminishing returns on how ‘polished’ polished can really be.
- A total pushback against polish, ushering in a new grunge-like era where work that is a little more raw and rough is valued.
- The middle way, or what I will now call “The Corgan Method,” where our work is meticulously produced without polishing away the personality.
Realistically, we’ll likely end up with a version of all three.
AI can replicate that personality pretty well today, and probably even better tomorrow. So the choices you’re making are key… We need to see the decisions are distinctively yours even as AI makes that harder and harder to discern. How do you still make that distinction? Refining your taste so that even if the product is incredibly refined and polished, your POV cuts through it. Your choices, your orchestration, your vibe.
The value is increasingly going to shift from not being merely your craft, but your unique spin on it. Because even if AI did part—or all—of the work, you can still ensure it’s yours. Like a project manager shaping an outcome without personally executing every task, you can still make the finished work distinctly yours through what you choose to create, what you emphasize, and what you leave out.
Before AI, polish implied craft. Today, with the access to tools that make polish easy, it’s no longer a reliable measure of how much craft went into the production.
I don’t imagine we’re going to suddenly be pining for theatrical releases filmed on a VHS Camcorder, a surge in Wesley Willis devotees on the radio (excellent though he may be), or in essays written that entirely disregard proper spelling and grammar. But I do imagine there will be a push for an alternative.
Alternative to Optimization
Which creates the interesting challenge of deciding, as Tom Waits famously told Jim Jarmusch after winning the 1993 Grammy for Best Alternative Album for 1992’s excellent Bone Machine… “Alternative to what?! What the hell does that mean?!”
Well, I suppose, an alternative to optimization. Or maybe put better, an alternative to having every image, every caption, every thing tuned perfectly for the algorithm. A desire to occasionally see the seams. To let that random crash in the studio make it to the album cut because it signifies life. When the algorithm doesn’t just dictate what you see, it dictates what you create and how… we’re all likely going to revert to a very benign beige.
Interestingly, I had a recent conversation with my girlfriend about how boring Love Island has become because everyone seems to be sanitizing themselves—the opposite of what makes trashy reality TV fun. I suspect that that is a part of a larger trend. When the algorithms and sponsors who make being an Influencer (apparently the primary goal of actually going on Love Island) worthwhile demand a certain aesthetic that is free from drama or scandal… then that’s all we’re going to get. The feedback loop is vicious. Be fun but not too fun, be sexy but not sexual, be edgy but don’t use bad words. Benign beige.
High Quality, High Humanity
I’ve written before about how, in the age of AI, I imagine a premium on humanities. On how “taste” is likely to become far more important than an ability to execute perfectly, because the AI and other app advancement can make that the easy part.
We’re going to want to see the person behind the medium. High quality, high humanity. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a wall of sound professionally produced, not recorded into the mic of a boom box (shoutout early The Mountain Goats though, because that too can be great).
When everything is polished, nothing is.
So polish alone will stop being the way to stand out. When I, an individual who just likes to write out his thoughts as a way of processing them, can have a website this good… well, it probably stops being impressive. An impressive website is now table stakes because it no longer implies that I have excellent web development skills (I don’t, Codex does) or a team of folks working for me because my words carry enough value to justify that (again, I don’t).
Instead, and increasingly so, the substance is what will matter. The intent will matter. The choices made will matter. Including the choices you don’t make. Why did you use that film? That word? That guitar pedal? There were so many options, why not make other choices? When you can choose everything, the choices you make suddenly carry their own meaning to those who see what you’re doing.
So by all means, polish your work. Aspire to greatness… just know that the polish alone won’t be the thing that differentiates your work anymore: You will be.
