When Perfect Turns You Average

AI made perfection free. Keeping what’s expensive is up to you.

When the supermodel Cindy Crawford was starting out, her first agency wanted the mole gone. It sat just above her lip, a little off to one side, the sort of flaw a cover was supposed to hide. On early shoots, the retouchers airbrushed it out. Her mother talked her out of removing it. Then her first American Vogue cover kept it in, and the requests started coming for the girl with the mole.

The one imperfection everyone kept trying to remove became the single feature no one could copy. She became an icon with a unique signature.

Now we are all in the editor’s perfection chair, and the machine is far better than an airbrush. It edits the whole self, not just the cover shot.

We have always tidied ourselves up. You retake the photo and redraft the text before you send it. You read the email back in your head until it sounds like whoever you meant to be that day. The instinct to show a cleaner version is old and human. Editing was the filter and cost something, and that friction kept the shown self close to the real one, because polishing yourself was expensive, and most of us could only afford a little.

AI removes the last of the friction and makes it free. It rewrites the email in what it calls my voice. It offers a smoother word while I still try to figure out what to write. The mole comes off automatically now, on everyone, all day, for free.

While that’s convenient and easy, in reality, the machine tunes toward the average, not toward you. It learned the answer and the words by reading everyone, so its sense of “better” means what most people like. Each time you accept its version, you slide a step toward that mean. Cleaner. Smoother. And a measure less you, and certainly less interesting.

Do it often enough, and what was yours gets erased. The odd phrase, the sharp conviction, the rhythm of your voice. What remains is polished, competent, and interchangeable. Down the middle, where perfection turns average.

When everything can be polished, authenticity becomes a choice. The expensive thing is the self you have actually formed, not the edited self.

This is the paradox hiding in the AI tool. The more you optimize, the less there is to remember. Polish and disappearance are the same motion. A perfectly corrected face is a face you have seen ten thousand times. Crawford without the mole is a pretty stranger. Perfect turns you average, and average is the one thing no one keeps.

It comes down to what we hold to be true.

Truth comes in four kinds, running from the surface down to the core. The first is accuracy: getting the facts right. AI does this for free, better than I do. The second is honesty: saying what I actually think. AI can copy that, and copy it well, but it has no way of knowing whether the tidy version still means what I meant. The third is authenticity: sounding like who I really am. Here it starts to slip, because the only version of me it knows is the averaged one it already built. The fourth is formation: the truth I have lived and earned, the kind I held onto when it cost me something. Nothing can edit that into place.

The four truths are like a price list, and they get more expensive the closer they sit to who you are. AI gives away the ones that anyone could have been handed. It can’t reach the one you had to become. That last one is the expensive thing.

So the question this series keeps asking. When knowledge is free, what stays expensive? This time, the answer is your true, unedited self. The specific, unaveraged, slightly inconvenient you. Anyone can sound polished now. That went cheap overnight. Sounding like no one else got rare in the same instant. The one thing the machine cannot hand back is the self you refused to let it correct.

One instruction, small enough to use today. Before you accept the better sentence, ask whether it is truer or only smoother. Keep the note the machine wants to fix when it’s yours. A flawless surface was never the prize. Being different was.

Our kids will grow up where every surface can be perfected, and every voice pulled to the center. I keep asking what they will carry that the machine cannot supply. I think it is the thing I am trying to keep sharp in myself: a character specific enough to be worth knowing.

That is the expensive thing to carry onto the new frontier. Yourself, kept exactly as particular as you found it, mole and all.

The Expensive Things is a personal essay series about what stays valuable when almost everything else becomes easier, cheaper, faster, and more available. New writing most weeks. If this resonated, pass it to someone who would argue with it. Lars Nordenlund writes The Expensive Things and is the author of Survival of the Strategic Fittest (INSTRATE LLC, 2026). Danish by origin, American by experience, global by outlook.

Originally published at https://theexpensivethings.substack.com.