HUMANS MADE THIS began as a spark in early 2025.

At the time, I was deeply involved in a collaborative project for my previous company, one of those projects that quickly goes off the rails. Scope creeping by the day. Goals are constantly shifting and a sprinkle of internal chaos for flavour. Honestly, it could’ve been the pilot episode of a podcast.

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What struck me wasn’t the dysfunction, it was how quickly the human work my team produced was being sidelined in favour of AI-generated material. Individuals within the collaborative party were leaning on artificial output to patch cracks in the project, and the people doing the real thinking were pushed further to the margins.

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At the same time, I was running my own research on how AI fits into Agile development. My aim? To figure out how we can use AI without sacrificing the human essence of a project, how to keep work accessible, personal, and genuinely crafted in an era drowning in algorithmic sameness. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot don’t create. They remix. They recycle. They stitch together fragments of what already exists.

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And that’s not what clients pay for, especially when the work involves something as deeply human as customer experience.

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AI has never stepped into a café and held a conversation with a barista. It has never stood in an indie marina shop debating whether to buy a terrarium for its sister. It doesn’t feel, observe, or connect.

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So, why are we letting it make decisions about experiences it has never lived through? It’s like asking a smoke alarm to review a Michelin-star restaurant. It processes signals. It can detect patterns. But it will never taste anything. It’s the wrong tool to describe a human experience.

Meanwhile, during our daily doomscrolling, we’re swamped by AI art that’s never touched a paintbrush and deepfakes of public figures doing bizarre things they never did. The internet, once a vibrant, human space, is becoming increasingly synthetic. Beige. Recycled. Standardised through the loss of the human condition. HUMANS MADE THIS exists as a counterargument to the increasing dependency on AI in human workflows.  

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We don’t reject AI. We use it responsibly, intelligently, and with boundaries.

But in a world increasingly engineered by machines, there’s something powerful, prestigious, almost exciting, about being able to say:

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HUMANS MADE THIS