AI and Value

Watching AI devalue so much around us - we need to change the conversation. Less about how much more we can do, and more about how we can do better – it all depends on what we value.

I went to a public lecture this week on AI and creativity Future Minds: Creativity and Ethics in the Age of AI hosted by Dr Rebecca Marrone and Dr Maria Vieira. Afterwards, a few work colleagues and I sat around talking about what it all means. We all had backgrounds in creative fields – so the question of what AI means for that world felt pretty immediate. We spoke about friends experiencing a drop-off in work as clients opt for AI-generated work for "free" rather than paying designers. We chatted about the slop and how much of what is generated by AI is just slop. What I kept coming back to was this idea of 'value' – what it is and where in the chain to people place it.

More Is Not Better

The dominant argument for AI right now is that it's a multiplier – you're 30x more productive, you can output more, faster, and at lower cost. The numbers are always on the positive – it's more of everything. What's conspicuously missing from this argument is any reckoning with what more actually does to value.

We're living through a particular kind of abundance right now – not the abundance anyone was really hoping for where we have more money, free time, freedom, and care, more time and capacity for the things that matter. Instead, we just live in a time of more stuff – more slop, half-arsed attempts, and poor quality. It's fast-fashion logic applied to everything, with social media driving attention and AI the foot on the accelerator. The value of stuff has plummeted to the length of our attention span.

This isn't a new dynamic. Post-war, in an age of genuine scarcity, more really was better. Mass production meant a genuine improvement in people's lives. But the further you go down that road, the more quality tends to dip, because the pressure is to become cheaper and cheaper. The value of what's being produced declines while the volume increases.

You can see it in fashion where a $5 t-shirt now exists – a true marvel of mass production. But what is its value if you don't evaluate the true cost – not at the register, but in the sweatshops full of underpaid workers and the over-farmed fields that yield little but subsistence. You can see it in music where streaming provides access to an almost limitless catalogue of sound, but in doing so devalues our engagement with any of it to fractions of a cent. The art and craft that goes into producing a track, the actual skill required – these things got compressed into a monthly fee that rounds down to nothing for artists, but meanwhile the record labels are still profitable.

AI Accelerates the Devaluation

Now AI is doing the same thing to the written word, to design, to creative work more broadly. Anecdotal evidence from designers I know suggests that clients are moving toward AI tools and away from commissioning actual designers.

And here's the thing: I think AI could be great at removing the grunt work often involved in design – the high-volume, lower-stakes work needed to produce quality. Good designers have always tried to systematise the repetitive stuff – clipping out product outlines, matching colours across media – so they can spend more time on the work that actually requires thinking. The problem is that we're not using AI to free up that thinking time – the clients are not engaging with designers in the first place. They're using AI to eliminate the design and the thinking altogether - that's not where they see value. They see it as more, more design and for no cost. The race isn't toward better design and higher value work. It's toward more.

If that continues, we reduce everything to nothing until it becomes worthless – and then it gets subsumed by the platforms and corporations that want to monetise the resulting slop.

Value is Cyclical

Thinking this way is a bit depressing, but I don't think this is the end of the story. My feeling is that value tends to be cyclical. When things get so devalued and commoditised, people start seeking variation and difference. You can see it in craft beer, in specialty coffee roasting, in the slow fashion movement – small-batch, high-care products where someone is actually paying attention to quality. The price goes up, but so does the engagement. Coffee stops being a devalued brown drink and becomes something enjoyed, something of a ritual. People start caring about the provenance of the beans, the process, the craft. Value reappears and becomes baked into the product.

Whether that cycle can operate at mass-market scale, I'm not sure. Maybe some things can never return to holding genuine value - but if the pattern is real, then what is devalued now can recover its value, and quality does find an audience.

#### What We Should Be Asking For

What I'd like to see is more discussion about "better" rather than "more". Not "AI lets us produce 10x more content" but "AI lets our writers do better research and produce more nuanced work." Not "AI replaces our designers" but "AI handles the grunt work so our designers can spend more time actually designing." The tools exist to make that argument – the will to make it is missing.

Part of that is on us as consumers – being willing to disengage from algorithmically driven slop and not participate in the mass culture that demands it. It's up to us to call out when things aren't up to scratch and to genuinely value the people who do the hard work of curation – finding good things, sharing them, creating real signal in a sea of noise. In a world of AI-generated abundance, the person who curates well is doing something AI can't: exercising taste, judgement, and care on your behalf. That's worth recognising and supporting.

The harder question is how we collectively calibrate what we value beyond individual spending decisions. Consumer choice matters, but it's not enough on its own – not everyone has the luxury of paying more for the better thing, and the signals we send through the market are blunt instruments at best. We need better ways to express and aggregate what we actually want, beyond next quarter's numbers.

The deeper problem is short-termism. Value is a long-term proposition. It's not about next quarter or next financial year. It's about whether a business – or an industry, or a creative practice – is still standing in five or ten years. The number go up ideology at play that places more value on a rising stock price than anything else is the real problem. It places value only on the short term. It distorts the nature of value altogether.

That's the conversation I'd like to see more of.

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