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Friends, Most people think they judge creative work by taste, but taste usually arrives after something more profound. Before we decide whether we like a photograph or a piece of writing, we search for the trace of a mind inside it. We look for signs of intention, care and risk. We want to know whether someone made decisions that mattered. That faint sense that a real person is on the other side is the human signal. Human societies were built on our ability to read one another’s judgement. It guided trust long before we had language for it. We still follow that instinct, even when we do not notice ourselves doing it. You can see this in a photograph. Two images may show the same scene, yet only one feels alive. Someone waited for a change in light or a crack in expression. That choice carries a pulse you recognise instantly. Sculpture shows the same truth. A figure carved from stone can hold the maker’s handprint. It might be in the tilt of a shoulder or the tension in the fingers, but you can tell when the sculptor refused the easy shape and worked until something real appeared. Even small things carry this signal. A mannequin dressed by someone who understands fabric looks different from one dressed quickly. There is a nuanced intelligence in the way cloth is shaped to fall as a body would. You notice it without trying. Music reveals this instinct even more clearly. There is footage of Jay-Z hearing a new beat from Timbaland in the studio. The reaction arrives before the rhythm settles. A nod. A grin. A shift in posture. He recognises the years of judgement inside the sound. Timbaland did not stumble into it. Jay-Z senses the thousands of hours behind the beat in seconds.  Film shows the same pattern. A director can change a scene with a single instruction. Hold the pause. Look away before the line. Let the moment come from memory rather than technique. In “Doubt”, Viola Davis plays a mother trying to protect her son, and there is a moment when she lifts her eyes and speaks with a tremor that did not come from the script. It came from her life. You feel the truth even if you do not know her story.  I feel this instinct in myself. I have spent most of my life wondering whether my work was good, or at least good enough. For a long time my ambition was simple: avoid making anything bad. When I first began writing my book, I used an AI model to polish a section. It looked clean, almost impressive, and for a moment I believed it had helped. Then I handed it to my wife and she saw through it immediately. It felt like walking into a hospital and noticing the detergent. Technically spotless, maybe too spotless, and carrying a faint sadness that it had been scrubbed so hard. The language had surface shine, but none of the weight that comes from wrestling with an idea yourself. It taught me how easy it is to produce something that reads well yet feels dead. I started again with a clean page. And my brain. I often wonder what authorship even means now. Is it the writing itself? The thinking behind it? The trail of small decisions? Or is it nothing more than a name at the end? Influence is everywhere. Every search steers you. Every recommendation shapes the next question you ask. When I was younger, research had friction. If I needed an academic paper, I handed a slip to the library and waited two or three weeks for a photocopy. The delay forced me to choose carefully. I had to ask whether the idea mattered enough to justify the wait. Judgement grew out of that friction. Now I have something close to the Library of Alexandria in my pocket. Every paper. Every source. Every summary. All instant. It feels like a magic spell. But good by whose standards. Citing what, chosen by whom. The danger is not that the work looks wrong. The danger is that it looks right without any part of me deciding why. Many people have stopped noticing the signal altogether. The feed rewards fluency without depth and confidence without understanding. Instead of pushing people to think more carefully, many tools give people a sensation of competence that has not been earned. The smoothness feels normal. The numbness feels acceptable. After long enough, the absence of judgement stops feeling like a loss. Recycled formats give only short bursts of attention. They cannot hold us because they contain no lived risk. Compare the feeling of hearing a recycled melody with the jolt of listening to D’Angelo’s “Untitled” for the first time. Or the feeling of scrolling past a template joke versus reading Baldwin write, “The place in which I will fit will not exist until I make it.” A line like that carries a whole life behind it.  The deeper lesson came to me slowly. My book has taken ten years, not because I am slow, but because the world kept shifting beneath me. I remember stepping into the tech district in Shanghai a decade ago and feeling something uncanny in the air. It was like the moment in Inception when you realise the dream is already bending. It became clear that efficiency was the wrong destination. The real elevation was human. Not output. Not speed. The question that mattered was who we become when everything around us accelerates. I began to realise the advantage would belong to the people who understand their own judgement, not the people who outsource it. For years the world talked about humans versus machines and even I believed that framing. Now it is human plus machine. The tools will rise. If our abilities atrophy, we lose the only part that makes the pairing powerful. Perhaps that is why I still take quiet pleasure in pulling weeds out of the ground in summer, or fixing my daughter’s watch without looking up instructions, or making a difficult choice and knowing it was the right one. These moments have a grounded reality that no dashboard can replicate. Extracting complex research in minutes still amazes me, but it also feels strange when I remember how long that work once took. Words like heart, mind and presence mean something different to me now. Life is about being here, not winging it while the tools do the thinking. AI complicates this pattern in a more unsettling way. These models can imitate the rhythms we associate with judgement. They can introduce small imperfections that feel like human hesitations. They can create a tone that sounds lived even when nothing living shaped it. At some point we will not know what is genuine. And the real risk goes beyond art. If a bad actor can sway an election by layering these systems together, what else becomes possible? We will be surrounded by outputs that feel as if they contain a mind, even when no such mind was involved. The human signal will be harder to detect, not because it has vanished, but because it has learned to produce a convincing echo. When people judge whether a piece of work is valuable, they test three things without realising it. They ask whether a real decision has been made. They look for signs that something difficult has been carried with care, whether that difficulty is grief, doubt, time or reputation. They listen for the risk of a personal point of view. If these elements are present, the work feels human. If they are missing, the work becomes frictionless sameness, no matter how technically strong it appears. This is why creativity in the years ahead will not be defined by the brightness of the surface. It will be defined by the clarity of the thinking behind it and the cost the creator was willing to bear. People have always gravitated towards work that feels considered, lived and honest. That instinct does not fade in a world of powerful tools. It strengthens. As the mechanics of creation become easier, the presence of real judgement becomes the rarest and most recognisable signal. We want to feel that a mind was here. We want to feel that someone cared about the outcome. We want to feel that a human made a choice and stood behind it. That signal has always mattered. Now it becomes the difference between work that disappears and work that stays. Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
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