For years, luxury has worked very hard to make everything look effortless. I’m starting to think that’s becoming a problem.The perfect campaign. The immaculate hotel room. The watch photographed against exactly the right amount of shadow. Luxury has always hidden the work. That was part of the appeal. You weren’t meant to see the meetings, the edits, the abandoned concepts, the twenty versions that died before the one you saw made it out into the world. The final thing arrived looking inevitable, as though it had always been there waiting to be discovered.That made sense when beautiful work was difficult to produce. It makes slightly less sense now.AI can make almost anything look polished. Give it the right prompt and you can have a fragrance campaign before lunch, a hotel world by mid-afternoon and twenty variations of the same idea before anyone’s decided whether the first one was any good. The barrier to making something look expensive has collapsed. Not making something good, necessarily. Just making something look finished.That distinction matters more than people think.I’m not particularly interested in the argument that AI is going to replace photographers, writers, designers or anyone else creative. It’s too blunt, and frankly we’re already past it. The more interesting shift is what happens when polish itself stops being impressive. If everyone can produce something glossy, cinematic and beautifully lit, the thing that starts to carry value is everything the image generator can’t convincingly fake: judgement, authorship, difficulty, the slightly awkward decision that turns out to be exactly right.You can feel when something has been made with intent. Not because it looks handmade or imperfect, but because there’s a decision in it you wouldn’t have made yourself. A crop that feels slightly wrong until it suddenly feels completely right. A casting choice that makes you look twice. A piece of copy that hasn’t been sanded down until nobody could possibly object to it. Those are the bits I’m becoming more interested in, because they tell you someone actually chose something.Luxury has always depended on this more than it admits. A handmade shoe matters partly because somebody had to know how to make it. A piece of jewellery matters because of the labour buried inside it. A great hotel feels effortless to stay in precisely because dozens of people have obsessed over details the guest will never consciously notice. The effort disappears into the experience, but the value comes from knowing it was there.Branding is no different.The danger now is that brands confuse efficiency with progress. More assets, more variations, more content, faster turnaround. On paper, all of that looks sensible. In reality, it can flatten a brand surprisingly quickly. When the tool can give you fifty options, the creative job isn’t producing the fifty. It’s knowing which forty-nine to kill. That’s the part nobody talks about enough.I’ve spent more than thirty years watching brands become more themselves or, just as often, slowly lose the thing that made them interesting in the first place. It nearly always happens through accumulation. Another campaign that feels broadly right. Another image that looks premium enough. Another line of copy that sounds like the category. Nothing is actually wrong, which is exactly why it’s dangerous. You wake up five years later with a very polished brand that nobody could pick out of a line-up.AI accelerates that problem because it removes friction. And I think a bit of friction is probably good for us.It should be slightly difficult to arrive at the right image. You should have to argue about the line. Somebody should care enough about the casting to say no. The location should matter. The photographer should bring something that wasn’t in the brief. There should be moments in the process where the answer isn’t instantly available, because that’s often where the distinctive bit turns up.None of this means pretending technology doesn’t exist. We use AI. We’ll use it more. It’s brilliant for some things and already changing how creative work gets made. But I don’t think the luxury brands that win will be the ones that become best at hiding how little effort something required.I think the opposite may happen.The more effortless production becomes, the more valuable visible judgement becomes. Not fake imperfection. Not craft theatre. Just the sense that somebody was there, making decisions, rejecting the obvious, pushing past the first decent answer.Luxury should still feel effortless to the person buying it.But from where I’m sitting, it should probably look a little harder to make.