End of content perfectionism

Stop polishing everything to death. Be more human, embrace imperfection, and start livestreaming.

For decades, live performance required massive infrastructure. Musicians needed stages, lighting rigs, sound engineers. TV hosts needed studios, cameras, production crews. Quality meant budget, and budget meant barriers. The best productions felt cinematic because they cost cinematic money.

That’s collapsing. AI is democratizing production across software, music, and video, and while costs are plummeting and access is exploding, we’re also drowning in an ocean of perfectly polished noise. What matters now isn’t production value—it’s taste, perspective, and human perception. The twist is that both how media gets produced and how audiences perceive it are shifting simultaneously.

The Sora moment

When I started writing this, Sora was still in research preview. By the time I’m finishing, it’s launched publicly and made a massive splash. The quality is exceptional, people are having fun with it, but what’s more interesting is the “Sora or Real” trend that emerged—people posting videos asking others to guess whether they’re watching reality or AI generation.

Extrapolate these model capabilities forward, and we’re not far from stitching thousands of Sora clips into long-form content or generating entire videos that look so real you can’t distinguish them from footage shot on a camera. That future is measured in months, not years.

The shift to raw

Creators are abandoning the studio. They’re going live, shooting on phones, doing spontaneous pop-ups with three days’ notice. This is happening because humans crave connection with other humans, and as AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human work, we’re paying obsessive attention to what makes that connection possible. We’re hunting for imperfections, constantly gauging whether what we’re seeing is real or generated.

Anyone with a trained eye can spot AI now—long dashes are the tell, bullet points with bolded prefixes are another, and every medium has its fingerprints. That’ll change in months, not years, but for now the arms race is on. Creators who want human connection have to make content that’s unmistakably human, and the market is forcing this shift whether they’re ready or not.

What’s a bit sad is that when I work so much with language models, I start to pick up traits they produce. My somewhat original way of writing is converging with how the models write. It takes active effort not to do that.

What human actually means

Human is imperfect. It’s not having the best camera—it’s shaky footage, no makeup, visible mistakes. But mostly, it’s being present. Pre-recording is easy because you can edit, alter, polish until it’s pristine. Showing up live and performing without a safety net is hard, which is exactly why it works.

There’s something else happening too: nostalgia aesthetics are making a comeback. VHS grain, CRT monitors, early internet vibes. This isn’t accidental. When everything can look perfect, looking deliberately imperfect or vintage becomes a signal of authenticity. It says “a human made this choice.”

Live performance and spontaneous content are becoming the future of digital brands. More AI video means more pressure to look human. Livestreams are harder to fake. iPhone shots with shaky cameras turn imperfection into a feature. (Apple only shoots on iPhone, Theo told me recently, though they use cinema-grade lenses.)

The playbook here is to lean into what makes humans different: we’re unpredictable, spontaneous, full of surprises. Short announcement windows, pop-ups, ad-hoc events. You don’t have to take yourself so seriously when you’re just showing up as yourself.

Who’s already winning

Look at OpenAI’s livestreams. Their GPT-4 and GPT-4o announcements have more views than any of their polished videos. Fred Again sells out shows with three days’ notice, and this isn’t random—it’s engineered. He sends audio files through WhatsApp because he “likes the compressed sound,” which is a deliberate choice to make humanity a feature rather than a bug.

TBPN is taking sports (the world’s largest media fuel) and turning it into tech content through livestreaming, doing trading cards that put humans at the center while robots and AI compete with them. IRL streaming is racking up millions of views, and every YC company is putting out high-production cinematic videos that nobody remembers.

If your content feels overproduced, it probably is. Be more human. Be more imperfect.