In Defence of Friction

Constraints don't just limit output, they shape it. The episode draws on examples like Dr. Seuss writing Green Eggs and Ham to a 50-word limit, and Michelangelo carving David around a flawed slab of marble. When AI removes friction by collapsing the gap between idea and execution, you risk losing the journey that gives the work its character.

As creation becomes easier and more democratised, perception of value shifts. When something looks like it was generated at the click of a button, willingness to pay for it drops. Consumers are starting to premium-ise signals of human effort, intent, and authenticity. Content with a tactile feel, brands with a story, work where you can see the process.

Two things. First, integrate AI purposefully rather than letting it replace process. Use it as a sparring partner, or to introduce friction by asking it to challenge your ideas rather than agree with them. Second, pull back the curtain. Show the consumer the effort that goes into your work, so they keep placing appropriate value on it.

Jesse: Welcome to episode two of The Shift, the AI podcast where we cover how AI is shaping the reality of consumers. In episode one, we covered cognitive offloading. How over-reliance on AI is essentially changing the way we think, not just the way we use technology.

Today is quite an interesting topic. We're going to be looking at the process, that space between idea and output, and how AI is essentially closing that bridge between ideation and execution. We're going to turn our attention towards what gets lost along the way.

We were talking before about how we place massive premium on efficiency, and we like to default to this idea that if something's quick, and if we can remove bottlenecks, remove constraints, remove friction, then it's necessarily better. Today we're going to turn our attention towards how friction is actually a positive, and how constraints actually create a different kind of output along the journey.

Ben: Exactly. How they can add value, I guess.

One of the bits of feedback we got from the last episode from our many listeners, thank you for tuning in, was we failed to introduce ourselves. So we are now going to delight you all with a little bit of background on who we are. Do you want to kick off, Jesse?

Jesse: Yeah, I'll kick off. So I'm Jesse. I work as a strategist at TPA. Essentially, my role is to amalgamate audience insight, industry insight, and media insight, and use that to inform campaign strategy and ensure that our campaigns are as effective as possible. On the right platforms, speaking to the right audience and use that to inform creative as well.

AI for me is just another well, probably one of the most considerable since social media affecting forces on the way that audiences perceive value and the way that audiences think now. I'm particularly interested in, I think it was around 2022, 2023, when AI started to kick off, which is actually when I started joining as a strategist, how AI is going to impact the way that audiences think and the way they interact with brands.

Ben: So I'm Ben. I'm a director at TPA. As a business owner, my interest in AI is very much around how it's changing business, how it's going to impact how we work going forward. Obviously, running a marketing agency, our work has to resonate with consumers, so I'm also very interested in how it is changing consumers and changing how brands need to communicate with those consumers.

Right. Let's dive in. Today's topic is all about that gap between idea and output, and it's actually based on an article that you wrote a couple of months ago, Jesse, titled "Skip the Process, Lose the Potential."

Jesse: Yeah. That whole article was really around that middle space between ideation and execution, and how AI is essentially bridging the gap between the spark of an idea and the final product. I wanted to look at what is lost when we remove those bottlenecks, when we remove those constraints, when we remove friction, and how we might be best placed to try and surface that in our AI in the future.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. I think it's kind of underappreciated, isn't it? The value that comes out of friction and that comes out of difficulty. There are two ways of looking at it.

Firstly, friction can actually result in a better product. And secondly, from a consumer point of view, consumers value things that are more difficult, right? So if the perception of everything going forward is the click of a button, and you've got an output, well, what is the consumer going to value? Or what value are they going to place on a service where you used to go through a process, but you're not going through that process anymore?

Jesse: Yeah. The idea that friction is a negative and constraints are a negative is kind of a pervasive belief. All the products and tools position themselves as removing bottlenecks, increasing efficiencies, and making everything streamlined. Not that there isn't value in that as well, but I think it encourages a dismissal of the value of the journey.

Constraints don't just diminish output, they actually shape it. There are a few really interesting examples we were talking about earlier. One of them was a children's literature author who was challenged by a friend to write a children's story in 50 words. This word constraint essentially led to Green Eggs and Ham. Dr. Seuss reinvented children's literature working to this word limit. The cadence, the rhythm, the rhyme scheme. It was all made to fit that limitation. That limitation created a final output that completely changed the way that children read.

Ben: There's two other examples you've spoken about as well. The Post-It Notes one is one of my favourites. And then also a materials constraint with the Michelangelo sculpture, which I'll let you explain.

Jesse: Sure. It's an interesting anecdote. Really, this is what kicked off my whole investigation into this. There was this slab of marble that was a massive frustration for sculptors who were attempting to use it. A beautiful slab of marble, but streaked with weak stone. Every time someone attempted to sculpt it, they risked shattering the entire piece altogether. Eventually, Michelangelo studied the weaknesses in the marble and changed the shape of the sculpture around these weaknesses, and then created David, obviously the iconic statue.

So this idea that we can't work to weaknesses, we can't work to limitations, is actually a little bit misguided. AI promises to make things so much easier to do, but we need to have a little bit of a sensitivity to what are the positives that come out of friction, and how can we bring them into the future?

Ben: Integrating it purposefully, right? You have to look at what is good about the current process. Sure, there are going to be ways that you can integrate AI into that process to make it more efficient or even help you get to a better outcome. Use AI as a sparring partner, a work colleague to bounce ideas off. There are loads of really valuable ways to use it within a process. What you don't want to do is replace the process.

Jesse: We talked a lot about AI and its agreeableness, and how it affirms. Every now and then I have to actually tell the AI, "Don't just agree with what I'm saying. Introduce friction." You actually gave me an example of where you've created your own bot that's essentially as argumentative and disagreeable as possible.

Ben: Yeah. I like to do the odd investment in the stock market, so I was using AI to help validate some of my ideas. I thought, AI is agreeable, so I created an agent specifically to always take the counter position and tell me why I was wrong. It was so unenjoyable.

Jesse: Imagine. Arguing all the time.

Ben: I just stopped using it because it didn't have that same

Jesse: It's not personal though, is it?

Ben: No. There must be some kind of psychological… some kind of study where these models have figured out that actually, in terms of driving use which is what they want to do, to get everyone hooked, get you subscribed, jack the prices up, win the market or whatever it is the AI needs to be agreeable and polite. Because instinctively, as humans, we want validation. So the minute you have something that's actually quite aggressively disagreeing with you, your desire to use it falls off a cliff because it's no longer enjoyable.

Jesse: Obviously you don't have to go to an extreme, you don't have to encourage it to be argumentative for the sake of it. But there is something to be said for companies who are using AI and getting it to synthesise friction, to challenge. We've used it to create focus groups and bounce ideas. Especially in the creative industry, where a lot of the work you do hinges on an idea, whether it's a headline or a thought or an emotion or a story, it's very easy to have an AI that just goes, "That's the greatest thing I've ever heard. Keep doing what you're doing." When in reality, you could have just lost a little bit of perspective, and you can engineer that perspective by saying, "What would a 40-year-old mother of three think of this ad?" Or, "What would a Gen Z TikTok user think of this ad? Would it resonate with them?" That level of creating differing perspectives on your story is important.

Ben: And it keeps you grounded as well. The other thing on AI and its agreeability and the idea that you can have an idea, bring it to life really quickly. You can also use AI, and quite often do, to post-rationalise an idea as well.

Jesse: Oh, yeah. Retrospectively.

Ben: And that is, again, a very dangerous precedent, because if you ask an AI, "What do you think of this idea? How does it align to this strategy?". It's generally going to tell you how it does, not how it doesn't. So you've got to be very specific in saying, "Point out the holes in this. Where are the misalignments? Help me explore those."

Jesse: Which brings us to a really interesting shift that's happening at the moment, which is what consumers are premiumising. The value window is shifting. Our definition of premium, if everyone can make a Hollywood movie at the click of a button (not that we're quite there yet), what are people going to start valuing?

You can see it already. When movies have a tactile feel to them, when content is authentic, people are flooding towards that. They're developing a sixth sense for what's been termed AI slop, content that is easy to churn out. This premiumisation of quality signals. Signals that give us an idea that there was human intent or human thought behind a product or a service or an advert or a video is what people are going to start gravitating towards in the future.

Ben: It reminds me a little bit, I don't know if this is a terrible analogy or not, of organic food. You're willing to pay more for organic food, not just because you believe it's better for you, but you understand that more care has gone into producing it. More thought in terms of how it's produced. The feed, whether it's animals or vegetables, is of a higher quality. You value all of those things as a consumer, and therefore you're willing to pay a premium price for it. Maybe it takes longer to grow, probably because you're not dousing it with pesticides.

So I think it's this idea that content from a marketing perspective that is abundant and easy to churn out will not be valued. If you align your brand with that kind of content, you are potentially pulling down the perception of value of your brand overall.

Jesse: Yeah. And there's a real opportunity to lean the other way into that kind of premium space.

Ben: The key to that, even as a marketing agency, is you have to show the value. You have to show the process, the story. It's a little bit like why is there a sudden trend for open-style kitchens? I was at Fukku about two weeks ago, and I always sit at the chef's counter. I love watching the food being made. It's a real parallel in terms of how you place more value on something where you can see the effort that's been put into it.

Fukku's amazing. By the way, what's your favourite sushi?

Jesse: Oh, my days. Dragon roll?

Ben: Dragon roll for me, too. Anyway, that aside.

So I think there's this idea where if the perception of the consumer is that something's been generated by AI, and it's been generated by AI at the click of a button, the value that they're willing to pay for that diminishes. There's a bit of research around that essentially, if you see it being made, if you see the effort going into it, you immediately perceive the value and the quality of that thing to be higher.

Jesse: Yeah. It's an experience thing as well. You get to see how the sausage is made. You get to see under the hood. It's a tale as old as time. After the Industrial Revolution, handmade was a unique selling point for products, and suddenly a premium was placed on clothes where you could actually feel, or you knew the story, or you knew it was a heritage brand. Suddenly the tactility and the story was part of the value you placed on the product.

So the challenge for brands here is to think what is my story? What is my narrative? How can I give those signals that there was human intent behind your message, there was human intent behind your work?

Ben: It's not that AI is bad there are plenty of really useful use cases. But as the ability to create is democratised, what a consumer's going to value is probably going to be story, authenticity, and a bit of struggle to get to the result. If they're buying a product, they want to value the thought and the care that's gone into that product.

Jesse: There was a really interesting LinkedIn post I saw the other day, which was: "Yes, there are typos in my email, but at least you know I don't use ChatGPT to write my emails." I really liked the sentiment behind that.

Ben: Apart from you could just tell ChatGPT to put typos in it.

Jesse: Get rid of the em dash. Yeah, exactly.

Ben: 100%. Have you never told it, "Can you make this sound more human?"

Jesse: Absolutely. Make this sound more like me, Jesse.

People will start looking out for those signals. Quality is still important, but that sensitivity. It's the same thing with social media. Everyone has moved towards more authentic social media content in terms of what they engage with, what they want to share with friends. Things that camouflage into their feeds, that feel like they come from users, are performing in some cases better than more stale advertising, more branded content.

AI is going to present a similar sort of shift, where people are going to start looking for something tactile, something real, something they can emotionally connect with — something that AI can't replicate in that way.

This takes us to an interesting shift that's happening, which is people are more focused around meaning than the making. As AI starts to do the making for us, it's going to become increasingly important for brands to create content with intent and with a real human message behind.

Ben: Yeah, definitely. With everyone having the power to create, and so much content being out there, the bar is going to increase massively. The value in terms of profession may shift from creator to curator. It's actually not who has had the ability to create 500 digital pieces of art, but who's had the mastery to curate that one piece that really says something or really moves you as an audience member. It's not about the ability to create anymore, potentially. It's about the ability to choose the things out of the mass of possibilities now.

Jesse: This is potentially a future podcast topic in itself, which is how AI struggles to account for taste. There are a lot of suggestive algorithms that are quite successful, but it's very good at teaching us what we already like and sort of creating a chamber on that. It's not really great at taking the leap from the expected to the unexpected.

That is where a human will be able to make that choice. AI regresses to the mean. It's a system of probability, taught on existing data. So how is it going to take you from understanding to something that is a little bit more out of the box? That's where a human will be able to discern and make the decision.

As humans, we place so much value on things that are perceived to be difficult things that either take a lot of time or take a lot of skill to master. The locksmith example: if you came to me and you were like, "Jesse, I can pick this lock. Just give me 300 quid." I'm like, "Oh, that sounds like a bargain. I've been trying to get in there all week." 300 quid, and you do it in three minutes — I'm going to be slightly miffed with you. But if you did it in two weeks, then I'm going to be like, "Oh, he's obviously put in quite a shift." I would have to be in the room to see how much effort you put in. But that's an effort signal. The time that you spent putting in.

So I think people are going to become more and more sensitive to, and probably a bit more picky about, what they spend their money on now that things are getting easier and easier to do.

Ben: For us, this is a really interesting area as a creative agency. So much of our value already isn't seen. It's in the ideas we discuss, it's in the two routes that don't even make it to the client deck that helped us get to the route that did. That is all the process. That is all the value that goes into it.

There's already a little bit of tension in terms of value of creative work, it's very hard to put a value on it. If the perception shifts even further that everyone can do it themselves, because Gemini Nano Banana can generate an image at the click of a button, or a campaign strategy equally easily — what does that do to the economics of our business, even?

So we wanted to end the show with three easy, actionable takeaways. As this gap between idea and output closes, what do businesses need to keep in mind?

Jesse: I think create friction is the first one. It's one we talked about quite a lot these things we typically see as a negative, which is constraints. Whether it's word limits, material constraints, time constraints — these things actually shape the output. It's important to look at the process as we begin to remove bottlenecks, and see what's the value in it, what's the value in these things that we're trying to smooth over. Sometimes the bumpy road is actually the one you need to take.

Ben: The one for me is probably around authenticity. Pull back the curtain on what it is you do, show the consumer the effort that goes into your product or delivering your service, and they're much more likely to continue to place appropriate value on it — rather than assume that just because they can do it with a prompt now, that they should.

Jesse: Thank you for joining for episode two of The Shift. We'll see you guys next time.

Ben: We will. Not as long next time, though. We're going to be back sooner, aren't we, Jesse? We're going to commit to some dates.

Jesse: You'll get sick of us in a few months.