If you are someone who creates for a living, a writer, a consultant, a strategist, an advisor, a coach, a founder doing content alone – something important is changing in what clients are actually paying for.
They are no longer willing to primarily pay for a document, or a deck, or even, if we're honest, an idea.
Read on to find out what your customers and clients really want from you.
Something rather strange is happening in the market for creative work, and by that I mean anything that requires words to sell.
The more the AI-brainwashed hustle bros flood every channel with polished, competent, frictionless, fifty shades of beige content, the more valuable imperfect, expensive, slow, human-made work becomes.
This is basic economics behaving in a way that should delight anyone who has ever stared at a blank page and refused to give up on it.
When the supply of something becomes infinite, the definition of scarcity changes, and what has become newly scarce is something much harder to manufacture than automated faux competence.
That thing is… genuine perspective. Your lived experience, which is the messy, irreducible signal that an actual person was thinking (wile probably tearing their hair out) when they made this.
We have a word for it, the authenticity premium, and it is slowly restructuring how creative professionals get paid.
Let me give you the most glaringly obvious example I've come across.
Last autumn, OpenAI launched the first major brand campaign for ChatGPT. The most advanced AI company on the planet, with effectively unlimited resources, chose to shoot their ads entirely on 35mm film.
Nope, they didn’t go for AI-generated imagery. Instead, they paid for real film and everything that comes with it... Grain, imperfection, texture, limited takes, the warmth and tactility of a medium that forces you to slow down and make fewer, better decisions.
How about that?
The company whose entire business model depends on AI adoption understood, instinctively, that to earn human trust they needed to signal human craft. They used the visual language of imperfection to say 'we belong in your world, not the other way around.'
OpenAI, shoving their AI product in our faces left, right, and centre, chose analogue.
If that doesn't tell you where the value is migrating, I'm not sure what would.
But if you think this is a one off, here is some more significant data, for the number nerds amongst you.
In 2023, 60% of consumers said they preferred AI-generated content to traditional creator content. By early 2026, that number had collapsed to 26%! In three years! The correction is moving faster than the adoption did, which is either encouraging or alarming depending on how you've been spending your content-writing time.
If you think you've been saving time and money, I'm afraid I have bad news for you.
A 2025 study from the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions found that just by labelling content as AI-generated lowers people's willingness to engage with it, even when the content itself is identical. Same words, different label… Different response. And even if you don't label it, people can tell that something feels off.
Deloitte's 2024 Connected Consumer Survey found that nearly 70% of consumers are worried AI content will be used to deceive them. So, earning your customers' trust is becoming harder because of everyone else cutting corners with AI slop. Even if you refuse to participate in this nonsense, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out in the slop-induced noise.
Brands like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, who experimented with AI-generated holiday campaigns, realised something eyewateringly expensive… In emotional contexts, celebration, grief, connection, tradition, audiences absolutely prefer human-made work, AND they actively distrust the alternative. The cost-saving on production evaporates pretty swiftly once you factor in the public reaction.
Authenticity is an economic signal and not just a nice-to-have. Plus, its value goes up precisely because its supply is under threat.
So what does this mean for you, specifically?
If you are someone who creates for a living, a writer, a consultant, a strategist, an advisor, a coach, a founder doing your content all alone – something important is changing in what clients are actually paying for.
They are no longer willing to primarily pay for a document, or a deck, or even, if we're honest, an idea.
They want to pay for access to a specific mind. For the knowledge that the thinking was done by someone with skin in the game, with years of experience behind it, with a point of view that could not have been assembled by a system trained on the statistical average of everything already said by every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the internet pretending to have faux expertise.
This is the authenticity premium in professional services. And it is the reason that genuinely good consultants, advisors and writers are becoming more valuable, not less, in a world that is mind-numbingly sick of AI-generated output.
So, I invite you to self-reflect and question whether you are signalling that clearly enough.
A brief personal note, since you are on this list because you enjoy watching me think out loud and occasionally tie myself in mental knots.
I appear to be thinking about writing a second book.
The rational part of my brain, the part that vividly remembers how long the first one took and what it cost in sleep, sanity, and that fun thing called 'social engagements' I will never get back, is watching this unfold with something between alarm and resignation. The less rational part, which is apparently in charge, is finding it very exciting.
It will be called Thinkbait: The Human Experiment. The economics of authenticity is one of its central arguments. The book (if I manage to make it happen) picks up where the first left off, past the manifesto and into the evidence. What actually happens to a mind that outsources its thinking. What cognitive science says about creative atrophy. What it costs, personally and professionally, to let a machine speak for you.
I am also designing original research. A longitudinal study following professionals through deliberate AI weaning, tracking what they lose first, what eventually comes back, and what the cold turkey experience actually feels like from the inside. Three groups, three months, then everyone stops. I expect the data to be fascinating and the participants to be furious with me by week four.
It will either be a serious contribution to an urgent conversation, or the most elaborate form of self-punishment I have yet devised. Quite possibly both.
If you have thoughts, experiences, or an unaccountable urge to be a research participant, please reply. I read everything.
And... before I let you go.
Instagram's CEO recently wrote that the platform's priority is to verify authentic content and surface credibility signals about who is actually posting. The largest photo platform in the world is now treating human provenance as a ranking signal.
Proving you made something is basically becoming a major feature.
The professionals who thrive in the next decade will be the ones whose thinking is so clearly, visibly, irreducibly their own that no one would bother to ask whether it was AI-generated.
That is the only competitive position that cannot be automated.
More soon, and thank you, as ever, for being a person who still reads things. Especially my long ramblings.
Zsike
P.S. If you missed my email from Tuesday, I made a rather compelling case for why a six-month LinkedIn authority-building retainer is a more compoundable investment than a large canvas of burnt sienna and existential dread, and why the UK tax year ending on 5 April makes this a structurally convenient moment to do something intelligent with a budget before April resets everyone's good intentions.
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