Let me talk about quality today. There is a very common argument against it, and it keeps coming back. It was true with music. It was true with photography. For the last few years it has been true with filmmaking too. And soon it will be true with AI, which is busy turning every creative effort into a commodity. I say commodity, but not in the way you might think. Hold that thought, because I want to come back to it.
The argument usually sounds like this.
Why should I pay a photographer to take a good portrait when I already have a phone in my pocket?
And my honest answer is, if all you want is someone to press a button on a camera, then you are right. Save your money and use your phone. It will be enough.
But if you want a portrait you will never forget, the photographer brings something your phone cannot. He will pick a better spot than you would. He will pick a better time of day. He will choose the camera and the lens for exactly what you want from that photo. Put the two pictures side by side and you will see it at once. A phone photo looks like a phone photo. A portrait taken with the right lens looks like something else entirely.
You Can Hear It Too
The same thing happens with music and with good listening gear. I am not talking about expensive audiophile toys here. I am talking about equipment that is simply made well. Headphones that reproduce sound honestly, a proper music player, and recordings that have not been squeezed and thrown away.
Imagine I handed you my headphones, which are planar magnetic and play very evenly, along with my music player, which uses an R2R DAC, and I played you a lossless FLAC file. You would hear the difference straight away. There would be no need to argue about it.
And here is the part that matters. After that, you would not happily spend an hour listening through cheap headphones, with a weak DAC, playing compressed files. Once your ears know what good sounds like, going back feels like a small loss every time.
My Daughter and Interstellar
Film works in exactly the same way. My older daughter, Helena, is into filmmaking, and she loves watching movies. Recently she watched Interstellar several times in a row.
Right after that she put on Harry Potter, which she had been enjoying earlier and genuinely liked. But this time she turned to me and said she could not watch it the same way anymore. The acting did not feel as strong. The picture did not look as good. The story did not feel as real to her. She simply preferred Interstellar.
So you see it, you hear it, and you feel it. That is the pattern across all of these things. Once you have experienced real quality, a part of you can no longer pretend not to notice.
Now, About AI
Here is the thought I asked you to hold. Today you can generate a whole article from nothing. The machine will happily write it for you. But do you really want to read something produced by an artificial tool, something that describes no human experience and carries no human feeling? Be honest with yourself.
If you knew for certain it was written by AI, you probably would not want to read it at all. And yes, if someone uses a capable AI, edits the result carefully, and chooses not to tell you, you might be fooled for a while. You might even believe it came from a real person.
But the moment you find out it was generated, something shifts. The sympathy you had for that creator quietly disappears, and you go looking instead for another human, one who is willing to share their own thoughts. That search is not a flaw in us. It is the whole point.
The One Thing That Survives
This is what people have always wanted from creative work. Not perfection, but a story that was imagined by another human being who wanted to pass a feeling along to someone else. We read and listen and watch in order to meet that person on the other side.
So do not be afraid of AI. It can generate portraits and images and articles, and it can do it quickly. But it cannot hand you a feeling. It cannot tell you what it felt while standing on the mountaintop, in the cold, the moment before the photograph was taken. It was never there.
That is the good news, and it is worth holding onto. The space for honest, human work is not shrinking. It is becoming more precious. So keep making things that carry your own experience. Choose the better lens, the better recording, the better story. Put your real self into what you create, and trust that people will feel the difference. They always do.
Do Your Own Research
On hearing the difference in sound quality
Reiss, J. D. (2016). A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 64(6), 364 to 379. A review of 18 studies and over 12,500 trials found a small but statistically significant ability to tell high resolution audio apart from standard quality, and that ability rose sharply with training. Read it here
On why music and art move us
Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14, 257 to 262. Using brain imaging, the researchers showed that intense pleasure from music triggers real dopamine release, the same reward chemistry behind other things we crave. Read it here
On how we value AI made creative work
Raj, M., Berg, J. M., & Seamans, R. (2026). The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure Penalty: Humans Persistently Devalue AI-Generated Creative Writing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Across 16 preregistered experiments with more than 27,000 people, the same text was rated lower once readers believed AI was involved, and the effect was driven by a loss of perceived authenticity. Read it here
Agudo, U., Arrese, M., Liberal, K. G., & Matute, H. (2022). Assessing Emotion and Sensitivity of AI Artwork. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 879088. People judged the very same artwork as lower in emotion, sensitivity, and quality when they were told the artist was an AI rather than a human. Read it here
