The BrAIn With No HeART
Last month, our very own Co-Founder and CEO, Chris, joined Rene Looper, Founder and CEO of Tuminds, to co-host Unlock AI for Smarter Marketing at Highland Spotlight.
One thing Chris said that really struck a chord with both the audience and me was: “AI has never seen a sunset.”
“It’s never seen a rainbow, felt snow melt on its nose, or stood in awe of a beautiful sunset. It’s never held a newborn child.”
That thought stayed with me. It got me thinking about what it means to create, connect, and feel, and how different that is from what AI can actually do.
The strange thing about AI is that it’s never actually experienced anything. It’s never seen a rainbow, felt snow melt on its nose, or stood in awe of a beautiful sunset. It’s never held a newborn child, or felt that quiet rush of pride when something you’ve created finally works.
And yet, AI can describe those moments beautifully. It can talk about the colours of a sunset in rich, poetic language and tell you exactly how it makes people feel. But all it’s really doing is borrowing from other people’s experiences. It can say the right things, sometimes perfectly, but it hasn’t felt them. It recalls data, not memory. It speaks from empathy, not experience.
That’s not to say it’s without value. But it’s a shortcut. It skips the legwork, the real learning, the lived reality, that gives something meaning.
Natural Selection
Take Apple, for example. When Jony Ive and his team were designing a new product, they didn’t just sketch an idea and run with it. They would create hundreds of prototypes, each with subtle variations, a slightly different bevel, a marginal shift in weight, a change in texture or balance. Then they’d ask people to hold them, walk with them, live with them, and notice how each one felt.
This obsessive attention to feel, balance, and tactile quality can’t be replicated by AI. A machine can model dimensions, predict grip points, and simulate ergonomics, but it can’t feel the difference between something that delights in your hand and something that just works. That sense of intuition, of knowing when something simply feels right, comes only from human experience.
That kind of design reflects a deep connection between maker and user. It’s not about how something looks, but how it feels and works in the real world. It’s the result of countless tiny, deliberate decisions, the ones that make something intuitive, comfortable, and human.
AI, on the other hand, hasn’t lived those decisions. It can imitate the outcome, but it doesn’t understand the craft, or the failures, insights, and moments of frustration that lead to a refined idea. And yes, large language models can absorb our learnings and echo them back, but they still can’t dream or conceptualise something truly new.
And that distinction matters, because the products and brands we connect with most aren’t just functional. They feel right.
“Today, we buy based on feeling. Emotion has become the currency of modern brands.”
Emotional Branding
For decades, products were sold on their features. Then came the benefits era, how something made life better, faster, easier. But today, we buy based on feeling. Emotion has become the currency of modern brands.
As anyone who follows my articles knows, I love a wee fable to make a point.
True Love?
Imagine, for a moment, a woman who meets a man and falls in love. They travel, share experiences, build a life together. Years pass, and it all seems perfect — until one day, he confesses that none of it was real. He played the part, said the right things, but never truly felt the way he made out. (True crime fans, my partner Amy included, will know this isn’t exactly a niche scenario.)
In that instant, everything changes. The woman’s memories remain the same, but their meaning has changed. This is retrospective disillusionment at its finest. What was once beautiful now feels hollow, manufactured. The experience she thought she’d shared was only ever simulated.
That’s what happens when we start mistaking imitation for authenticity. AI can produce moving words, beautiful images, even stirring music, but when you realise it hasn’t felt any of it, the illusion fades. The ignorance was bliss.
It’s like buying a jacket you believe Elvis once owned. You treasure it because it feels like a story you’re part of. Then you find out it’s a fake. The cotton hasn’t changed, but the meaning has vanished. The value was never in the fabric, it was in the story. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel quite so nice to wear.
“In a world where meaning, story, and emotion drive connection, especially in high-emotion categories like design, creativity, and brand, can you really afford to let AI fake it for you?”
In a world where meaning, story, and emotion drive connection, especially in high-emotion categories like design, creativity, and brand, can you really afford to let AI fake it for you? If your audience senses the feeling isn’t real, they’ll feel just as cheated as the lover in the story, or the fan who was all shook up when they discovered their prized jacket was never worn by The King.
Don’t get me wrong, when used the right way (don’t worry, Pendle, I’m not stealing your tagline), AI is an incredible enabler. In the example above, neither ChatGPT nor Gemini is losing sleep with a newborn any time soon. They don’t know how it feels to hold a baby, but they can help you see it differently, by sharing perspectives you might not have considered and helping you articulate them.
Even for pieces like this, I often “liaise” with my preferred LLM. I share transcripts, voice notes, and rough drafts, and get it to write in my style. That gives me a strong second draft, one I can edit back into my own voice. I’d never have reached the same conclusion without AI’s help.
Final (conscious) thought
AI is brilliant at form. It can assemble, organise, and present with extraordinary precision. But the feeling, the lived, flawed, human truth, still belongs to us. That’s what makes ideas real. And as always, bringing it back to brand building, that’s what makes brands matter.
