Fred Gelli is CEO of Tátil Design

The gesture, the prompt, and the nostalgia of what makes us human
Recently, Hermès, one of the world's most consistent and prestigious luxury brands, made a clever move. Hand-drawn designs began appearing on its website and social media: imperfect lines, visible brushstrokes, almost simplistic animations. There was evidence that a person was behind them. The brand invited around 50 artists from around the world—illustrators, painters, musicians—to translate, in an absolutely personal way, their relationship with the brand's values. The brief was open, and the result was profoundly human. And this movement went viral.

What went viral wasn't just an aesthetic choice. It was a provocation.

In a world saturated with technically impeccable images, generated, refined, and optimized by artificial intelligence, where the fantastic has become vulgarized, that communication seemed to say: here there is still hand, time, error, gesture, pulse. Here, there is no algorithmic mediation between intention and result.

Something very similar happens in music. The continued success of Tiny Desk Concerts reveals a clear desire for less mediated experiences. Exposed voice. Minimal arrangements. Possible error. Artists seated, close together, without spectacle. What mobilizes there is not the super-production, but the feeling that there is someone on the other side. A body. Real time. An energy that cannot be simulated.

This return to craft, to the handmade, is not a rejection of technology. It is a response to an imbalance.

I have the feeling that we are beginning to live an anticipated nostalgia—a nostalgia for what still exists scattered around, but which we sense is at risk. A nostalgia for what makes us human.

In my last article, I talked about sensoriality. About how our relationship with reality passes through the body, through physicality, through the multisensory experience of the world. Not just seeing, but touching, hearing, smelling, feeling the weight, the texture, the friction.

A hand-drawn picture doesn't just communicate an image. It carries the body's time, the pressure of the gesture, the hesitation, the decision. There is a natural intelligence manifesting itself there. A type of cognition born from the encounter between desire and impulse. Message and form, pure expression in flesh and blood.

Artistic expression as the foundation of humanity

This perception is not romantic. It is structural.

Studies in neuroscience and anthropology from some of the world's most renowned universities indicate that art is not an adornment of civilization; it is one of its most important invisible infrastructures.

Art is, historically, a liberating instance. It teaches us to deal with ambiguity, with the improbable, with what escapes linear logic: art trains us for life. It makes us, in fact, human. What could the synthetic production of content mean in the medium term?

Perhaps we are talking about a transformation of unprecedented scale. Not like when photography emerged, nor like when cinema was born. We're talking about tools that not only record or amplify, but directly intervene in the creative process.

That's why nostalgia makes sense. Not as an escape, but as a warning.

The algorithms that organize the platforms and train artificial intelligence operate on a clear logic: engagement. What keeps people connected longer is worth more. And, most of the time, what engages is what's recognizable. What has already worked. The average taste. In a context of hyper-productivity, where everyone produces more and faster with the support of AI, the system enters a vicious cycle. Copy of a copy of a copy. Less diversity. Less accident. Less deviation.

Some data helps to put this scale into perspective. Recent estimates indicate that around a quarter of the content consumed today on platforms like YouTube already involves some degree of AI generation, whether in script, music, image, or editing.

The risk is not the technology itself. The risk is the flattening of the repertoire. When everything responds to the same engagement criteria, when everything references what has already worked, we lose precisely the variables that make culture advance: deviation, the strange, that which initially doesn't engage but transforms. Or, as I've called it before, a creative instant noodle: quick, ultra-processed, momentarily satisfying, but not nourishing. It doesn't create memory. It doesn't create bonds.

This is one of the core issues of the crisis we are experiencing. And perhaps one of the deepest reasons for this diffuse feeling of withdrawal. We are not just tired of screens. We are becoming deprived of creative diversity.

The problem is that life doesn't evolve like that. Life evolves by increasing diversity. Rich ecosystems are diverse ecosystems. The greater the diversity, the greater the resilience. Homogeneous ecosystems are fragile. What we are experiencing today is something similar on a cultural level. A symbolic impoverishment that is beginning to be felt in body and soul.

I just finished reading a book that deeply impacted me and helps shape this intuition: *Ways of Being*, by the writer and artist James Bridle. Bridle proposes a radical shift in the idea of ​​intelligence. For him, intelligence is not something one possesses, neither in the isolated individual nor in the machine, but something practiced in relation. It is not contained; it is in the in-between: in the encounter, in the context, in the exchange, in shared time. And the contemporary problem, according to him, is not the emergence of artificial intelligence itself, but the fact that we have spent centuries unlearning to recognize these other forms of intelligence. By reducing intelligence to what can be measured, predicted, and optimized, we have distanced ourselves from relational intelligences—present in bodies, in the arts, in ecosystems, in unmediated interactions.

Perhaps part of the unease we are beginning to feel comes precisely from this. We have entered a kind of relational abstinence. We invest less and less in rituals that operate through sensitivity, not efficiency. We seek shortcuts to instant inspiration, to immediate answers, because we no longer have time to look for them where they truly are.

Therefore, perhaps this "craft renaissance," as some are beginning to call what is emerging, is not just another trend. Perhaps it is a real symptom. It is the body asking for presence. It is culture trying to recover essential variables of its own evolutionary process.

So, let's invest more in what our hands can (still) do, driven by our natural, multifaceted, sensitive intelligence, born from a true relationship with reality, with nature, with people. More brush, less mouse. More brainstorming, less prompts. More truly creative rituals. More paper, less screens. It's time to recover our appetite for the act of creating, without the crutches of AI—at least in the moments of conception.

Because, in the end, it's by no means about rejecting technology. It's about not letting that which allows us to use it with awareness, imagination, and humanity atrophy. Because that is a real risk: not only losing technical capabilities, but losing perception. Losing the critical eye to discern what has value and what does not, what is true and what is false, what is in fact a real product of human expression.

As James Bridle says, the risk is not that machines will become more intelligent.

It is that we will become less sensitive.