Visibly human is the flex now

Something interesting is happening: the more sophisticated our tools get, the more people are reaching for things that feel handmade.

Nostalgia is part of it, but it isn’t the whole story. Choosing the handmade and the analog is a deliberate signal — that a real person made this, chose this, or sent this.

It's a direct response to the AI surge that's making everything feel automated… and bland.

The handmade is rising because the automated is. And founders, creators, and businesses are leaning into that — making the human hand visible on purpose, as a differentiator.

I see new examples daily. Here are just a few recent ones:

News media, wedding videography, publishing. The industries are different, but the trend is unmissable: make the human part the part you can see. Which is why I wanted to bring someone into this conversation who's thought about it longer than most of us. Zia Hassan is a certified coach and a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins, where his research sits at the intersection of education and AI. He's also spent time at Microsoft and IBM. His take: AI's rise is making the human parts more valuable.

See you next time!

— Jacci

Meet Zia Hassan, a coach and instructor at Anne Arundel Community College, where he teaches courses in coaching, education, and developmental psychology. He's also pursuing a PhD at Johns Hopkins, where his research focuses on the intersection of education and artificial intelligence. Alongside his academic work, Zia is a career and business coach, drawing on a background that includes time at Microsoft and IBM. His thesis, in short: as AI gets faster and more accurate, the human qualities it can't replicate become more valuable.

Jacci: What's something about human connection you've seen AI fail to replicate — and likely won't?

Zia: I'll start with an anecdote. Last semester I taught a graduate course at Hopkins called AI and Education. We were talking about schools that are replacing teachers with "guides" and using AI to teach. So I ran an experiment on the fly. I told the students: get on your AI of choice — doesn't matter which one — and get it to tell you a joke that actually makes you laugh. Even just a quiet inside chuckle counts.

We could not do it. The one person who said, "Okay, this is kind of funny," — we Googled the joke and it turned out it already existed pre-AI.

That illustrates a larger point. A sense of humor hits on a shared sense of humanity. The best comedians make observations that make you think, "I've always thought that and never said it out loud." They've had life experience. These generative AI models have never tasted ice cream. They've never walked on the beach late at night. They've never fallen in love. That's why I believe they can't actually make jokes.

Now extend that to romance, to love. There are services right now offering AI companionship — it's a huge use case. To me, calling that connection is almost like calling Cheetos food. They're edible food products made by a company. I wouldn't really call them food.

You're working on a framework for helping people figure out how much humanity they've lost to AI — and how to get it back. Where did that come from?

Zia: I follow some LinkedIn influencers who post about AI and education. One of them recently shared a piece on redesigning assessment — a huge issue right now. Every single strategy in it centered AI. Have students put the assignment into AI first and react to its responses. Everything was about the AI.

It hit me that everyone is building frameworks for integrating AI into the classroom. Meanwhile, every time I get an email that was clearly run through Copilot or ChatGPT, I want to throw up. What's so embarrassing or lacking in confidence that you'd run a simple email through an LLM first?

If I feel that, others will too. At some point we'll look around and ask: have we gone too far? Have we lost humanity? We'll need a navigational system. That's what I'm trying to build — call it a rehydration framework.

You've pointed to a paper called “Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors" that's shaping your thinking. What's its argument?

Zia: Right now schools are stuck between two camps. One says let AI go rampant — it's a tool, kids will use it at work eventually, just let them use it. The other says no, there's a friction that comes with learning something well, and we need to preserve it. Bring back blue books and oral exams.

Most people land in a middle ground: use AI as a collaborator. Students collaborate with AI to brainstorm essay ideas, fix transitions, whatever. The paper's argument is that the middle-of-the-road position is bullshit — and by that they mean it's not a lie and not the truth, but it's unconcerned with truth. Which is the most accurate description of an LLM I've ever heard.

The other point is: how can AI be a collaborator when it can't take responsibility? Only something that can take responsibility is a real collaborator. A computer can't do that. So when we say "collaboration," we're really just admitting we don't have a solution.

AI is wired to please the user. How does that show up in education? 

Zia: I wrote a garbage paper for a statistics class and put it into AI for feedback. The response was: this paper is fire, you are amazing, look at all the amazing things you did. Here are some suggestions.

People always say, well, just tell it to be more aggressive, meaner. True. But it's only doing that because I asked it to. Whereas a person with their own lens and core values — which a computer doesn't have — I don't have to coach them on how to give me feedback. I trust them, and I'm going to get real feedback.

A lot of teachers are using AI to grade and give feedback. I'm not saying it just tells students they all got A's. But it takes away from the relationship between teacher and student, which I believe is critical for learning.

You train coaches and speak to coaching communities a lot. What's their relationship with AI right now? 

Zia: It's shifted from fear — "this is going to take my job" — to something more open. My core message: your role is going to become more valuable, because human qualities will become more valuable. When AI-generated coaching is free and everywhere, the value of an actual human with a brain and a nervous system goes up.

But I do see coaches sending me assignments that are clearly AI-generated. I never call anyone out. My guidance is: if you're building a business meant to appeal to humans, and you're using words a computer generated — even if they sound more sophisticated than what you'd write — you're not going to attract people who are looking for you, the human. People want to work with someone they know, like, and trust.

Why are you optimistic that this swings back toward human?

Zia: We're social creatures. We're not designed to get our connection needs met by algorithms.

Look at social media. To me, it's the junk food of social connection. You connect with a massive audience, you get likes, but how deeply are you actually connecting? We have access to every person in the world and we're lonelier than ever. What does that tell you? It tells you we're not in rooms breathing the same air.

You can delay getting those needs met for only so long before you start to feel miserable. So I think people will come around. The human reintegration framework — the rehydration framework — is going to be necessary.

⦿ Real relationship building for the win (and ↗ revenue): Jay Acunzo, the speaker and advisor, recently published a detailed look at how he rebuilt his business after the pandemic wiped out most of his keynote speaking work. After years of refusing to play "the gimmicky social media game," he's found that giving talks to ~20 qualified people in a mastermind generates more business than posts with 10K likes. For Jay, the shift to relationship marketing — which includes webinars, podcast guesting, networking 1:1 and in small groups — meant slower follower growth and virtually no email list growth. But spending more time on “networking calls than carefully crafting social content” resulted in about 3x more leads. He also reports that his bookings for the year have already helped him exceed his 2026 revenue target.

⦿ LinkedIn ROI but not gimmicky: One of my favorite content strategists, Josh Spector, has a simple rule — when someone likes or comments on his post, he comments on one of theirs. His reasoning: rewarding the people already paying attention to you matters more than chasing new followers. It’s a great way to build relationships.

⦿ What’s hot for team-building? Axe-throwing: With morale slipping, layoffs looming, and the after-work happy hour fading, workplaces are looking for new ways to bond and rage rooms and axe-throwing studios are stepping in. At Bury the Hatchet — which offers axe-throwing events for groups of 12-90 people across the U.S. — corporate events now make up the majority of business.

⭐Words can help your business grow. A recent study found that high-quality CEO thought leadership creates an average of $367 million in value in a single week¹ — just from the writing itself. Helping leaders and companies communicate in ways that create real value is what I do, using 15+ years of experience across journalism, professional services, nonprofits, and tech.

✅I'm taking on select projects. Email me if you've got a message that isn't landing the way it should.

❤️That’s all for this issue. If you have a minute, let me know if you found it helpful. Thanks for reading!