Hermès bet on hand-drawn art and won the internet. Emily Oberg's AI shoot came back dead in the eyes.

The talk about AI in creative work used to be all upside. Cheaper shoots, faster assets, more volume. That story cracked this year. Founders ran the experiment, saw the results, and walked it back. Luxury houses did the opposite bet and got the internet's loudest cheer in years. Something shifted in what customers reward, and it is worth your attention before your next roadmap review. Let me catch you up.

The deep cut

• Human craft is now a positioning move, not a cost. Hermès put Sarah Martinon's brushstrokes on screen and the internet cheered.
• Cheap AI assets can cost you trust. Emily Oberg saved on a shoot, got "dead" eyes, and went back to a human team.
• Consent is the real product decision. Instinct booked nonrefundable reservations without asking and burned its 48-hour honeymoon.

The shoot that came back flat

Emily Oberg founded Sporty & Rich on taste. So when she tried AI for her e-commerce images, the test carried weight. Each twice-yearly shoot runs "upwards of" $200,000, and she wanted relief. The savings were real. The images were not. Oberg called them "flat," with models who "look dead in the eyes," styling that was "mediocre," and a "certain lifelessness."

She went back to a full human team. Her read: AI "will never possess good taste the way that a human does." Whether you buy that as a rule or not, the business math changed on her. The cheap option did not clear the bar her brand sells on, so it was not cheaper at all.

The bet that got euphoric applause

Hermès went the other way this summer. It built its campaign around illustrator Sarah Martinon, flying horses over pink mountains, sneakers drawn in brushstrokes. The response, as Creative Boom put it, "felt like a line had been drawn in the sand." Customers read visible human effort as respect, and AI shortcuts as a brand that "cut corners."

Martinon's path shows why this is hard to fake. She moved from patterns to murals to a physical Hermès window in Lugano where she painted "absolutely everything, down to the covers of every book in the piles on the floor." That specificity is the point. It is authorship customers can feel, and it is exactly what the flat AI shoot was missing.

The trust bill nobody wants to pay

The pushback is not only about aesthetics. It is about consent and cut corners, which is the same complaint in a different coat. The AI agent Instinct was, for about 48 hours, the product everyone wanted. Then it kept email copies after users revoked access and booked nonrefundable reservations without asking. Katie Jacobs Stanton's line landed: every good action earns a little trust, one unauthorized one resets it to zero.

Designers are building for that fear directly. Dezeen rounded up work like Mixfont's Decoy Font, which reads two ways to humans and only one way to ChatGPT, built for people who want to defend against data scraping. When your customers are wearing camouflage against machines, "we used AI to save time" is not a selling point.

Craft is not the same as taste policing

Do not read this as permission to sneer. The instinct to call other people's work "slop" is its own trap. Creative technologist Marisa Chentakul is tired of it: "calling something 'slop' doesn't really tell us anything about why it works or doesn't work." Her better question is whether something feels intentional.

That is the useful frame for your team. The Hermès win was not "human beats machine." It was intent that customers could feel, made by people who cared about the book covers no one would notice. Aim there, and the AI question mostly answers itself.

Three questions for your team

• Where are we spending real money on human craft, and can a customer tell? If they cannot, you are paying for effort you are not selling.
• If we use AI in anything customer-facing, what is our consent and disclosure rule, before an Instinct-style reset hits us?
• Are we critiquing work for intent, or just policing taste? One improves the output. The other burns your bench.