Are we already at the point of full desensitisation to visual novelty? For years social media feeds have trained us to flick past hundreds of images a day. Each arrives with a small “wow,” and each swipe makes the next one cheaper. The extraordinary becomes ordinary, then disposable.
Now that drift accelerates. AI image and video systems—Sora 2, Midjourney, Runway, Stable tools and their look-alikes—let anyone create something that looks cinema-quality in minutes. Historical figures, celebrities, “you and your mates”: all can be dropped into hyperreal scenes that feel convincing enough to pass in a quick scroll. The rhythm doesn’t change: “Wow, look at this.” “Can it do that?” Then the shrug: “Nothing’s real and I don’t care.” Our receptors adapt. Surprise becomes wallpaper.
I’m not anti-AI. I was early to try these tools. The point is simpler: when shock becomes the norm, the extraordinary gets flattened. After a while escalation sets in—cheap insults, manufactured scandals, bent facts—and reputations drift into the blast zone. Social feeds start gasping for oxygen, filling the room with louder, slicker “we’re cooked” clips. Even the debunkers give up, not because they’re wrong, but because everyone is tired. Burnout becomes the default way of looking.
The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Call it novelty inflation: more spectacle, less feeling per unit. As the supply of amazement rises on demand, the price of astonishment falls. A century ago, spectacle demanded risk and time—think Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the massive sets of Hollywood’s golden age. Craft, rehearsal, danger, engineering. Today, a similar buzz can be summoned by anyone, on a laptop, in a lunch break. When amazement is on tap, we grow immune to it. Value leaks out of the image. Trust drains with it.
It’s not just “AI video.” It’s internet-wide. On-demand everything compresses the distance between wanting and getting: entertainment, news, faces, bodies, opinions, proofs. Filters and face-swaps erase friction. Infinite scroll erases endings. The result is a kind of sensory compound interest—tiny hits, endlessly repeated—until the account is overdrawn and you stop feeling it.
So what now? Three practical ideas that don’t ask anyone to go live in a cave:
1) Recalibrate the metre of value.
If astonishment is cheap, stop using astonishment as the yardstick. Ask different questions: Does this carry intent? Is there risk in it—emotional, intellectual, material? Does it hang around in your head tomorrow? Shock is a flash; significance leaves a dent.
2) Re-introduce friction.
Friction is not the enemy. Limits sharpen attention: fewer posts, slower viewing, context over clips. Hold back on “auto-publish everything” and let some things breathe. Watch long, not just fast. Read an image before you rate it. When everything accelerates, slowness becomes a competitive edge.
3) Prefer the unrepeatable.
What resists templating keeps value. A live encounter. A work with seams and fingerprints. A conversation that isn’t clipped to fit the algorithm’s beat. Use the tools, but let them serve the thing that can’t be rubber-stamped.
For collectors and makers, this is not a funeral notice. It’s a reminder that curation matters, craft matters, and live experience will hold a premium precisely because it cannot be mass-produced in the same way. The edge is a calibrated eye: knowing the difference between the loud and the lasting.
Will tools keep improving? Of course. That’s not the problem. The problem is what happens when we outsource our sense of scale to an engine that can manufacture surprise on command. If we keep asking the feed to thrill us, it will. And then it will again. And again. Until nothing thrills.
So guard your novelty threshold. Not with panic—just with attention. The muscle that notices is the same muscle that appreciates. Burn it out, and it may not return.
Daniel /NADA