Quality and Value

himself.He became the subject of the world's oldest known recorded customer complaint.Ea-nās .ir was paid in silver to deliver copper ingots, but his customer, Nanni, considered the final product to be substandard.Nanni was the original one-star reviewer, creating a grudge that outlasted empires.He didn't have a smartphone, so he had to settle for a slab of wet clay, but the level of petty indignation is remarkably modern.Who do you think you are, treating someone like me with such contempt?…I will no longer accept any copper from you that is not of good quality…and I will exercise my right of refusal against you, since you have treated me with contempt.It's unclear if Ea-nās .ir made things right with Nanni, but we do know that he took this soft clay complaint, turned it into a permanent stone, and then kept Why do we get so upset when a product doesn't meet our quality expectations and when we don't get the value we paid for?Broken promises-whether they're between a brand and a person, a Bronze Age copper merchant and his customer, or just between two acquaintancesleave us off-balance and upset.Unmediated AI media, created mostly by a machine, often comes with the label that it's art.Why, then, does it feel like a broken promise? THROWING COPPERGoing back nearly 4,000 years, in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today's southern Iraq), King Hammurabi was building walls and deifying himself in Babylon.To the south, in the city of Ur, lived a copper merchant named Ea-nās .ir whose infamy came to rival that of Hammurabi W Quality and Value Bhautik Joshi Insights → We can measure the effectiveness of commercial AI art by examining its value and quality.→ AI art has helped us rediscover and affirm that art is a vehicle for connecting with other human beings.→ Unmediated AI art suffers from a value and quality deficit, decoupling human intent from the output and signaling a lack of effort to the consumer.