Remember that time your best friend gave a toast at your birthday dinner?
Remember how it was perfect? Nostalgic stories, inside jokes, the whole nine. You’re genuinely moved.
And then you find out he copy-pasted it from ChatGPT?
Ouch. Made you incredibly sad, right?
Same words. Same moment. But suddenly it felt like less.
Why?
For the same reason we don’t admire Michelangelo’s David because it’s beautiful and perfect. We admire it because some human made it. The stone isn’t the point, the unbelievable human talent and effort is.
We’re selfish creatures. We want proof that we could do something like that too, or at least, that humanity is actually capable of that level of greatness. Take that flesh and blood possibility away and replace it with an algorithm, and you’re left with no beauty, but something far more empty and banal.
We don’t value things because they’re valuable. They’re valuable because we value them.
Sadly for Taylor Swift, it appears her fans have figured this out sooner than she did.
When they spotted the claimed AI glitches in her recent video: the bartender’s hand clipping through a napkin, a coat hanger vanishing, the two-headed carousel horse, they ran to get the pitchforks. #SwiftiesAgainstAI went viral.
Not because the video was bad. It looked fine. The production value was there.
Everything went South because of what it said about her- and more importantly, about them.
Swift built her empire on intentionality. She wrote all her own songs when nobody else did. She hid Easter eggs in lyrics and encouraged fans to obsess over every word. As HBR wrote on her strategic brilliance, “The more she encourages her fans to interpret her music, the more sophisticated their interpretations become.”
She built an entire identity around people being a Swiftie. The AI video put a little chink in it. Not because AI is evil or because she didn’t deserve efficiency, but because it threatened what her music and community made them believe about themselves.
That obsessive attention to detail? That Easter egg hunting? It’s proof they’re the kind of people who notice. Who care. Who catch what others miss. The more she signalled intentionality and care and encouraged fans to interpret her music, “the more sophisticated their interpretations” became. And they liked that version of themselves.
The AI video threatens all that. Think about it. If she’s phoning it in, what does that make them?
Did she get lazy? Did her staff mess up? Doesn’t matter.
Her fans reminded her what they’re actually paying for. Not the output. The care. The intention. The possibility. They’re not buying her brand, they’re buying her humanity.
The math doesn’t lie. You get back exactly what you put in. Not sometimes. Always.
