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In 1999, at the Cannes Film Festival, there was a movie projection that made the audience physically uncomfortable. They literally booed it. Critics dismissed it as gratuitously violent, confusing, and fundamentally flawed. Everybody in the theater agreed: this was a bad movie.
That movie was Fight Club.
Twenty-five years later, Fight Club is considered one of the most important films in Western cinema. It’s profound and moving. It describes modern existence in a way that had never been done before—the emptiness of consumerism, the crisis of masculinity and the desperate search for meaning in a world devoid of it.
The same people who booed in Cannes eventually recognized they had witnessed something that would reshape how we think about storytelling.
Excellence Means Breaking Patterns
But the most surprising and eerie part of all this is that those critics weren’t stupid. They were real experts trained on everything that came before. They knew what made a good movie according to current standards.
And that’s precisely why they couldn’t see what was in front of them.
This is exactly where AI sits today. Large language models are the critics in that Cannes theater, trained on everything that existed until their cutoff date. They can tell you what worked. They can recognize patterns from the past. But they cannot—fundamentally cannot—identify what will matter in the future.
They have no capacity to recognize disruption because disruption, by definition, breaks the patterns they were trained to detect.
Keep Your Weirdness Separate From AI
This is why I’ve never built AI tools for content generation or evaluation. When I created my Claude content skills, I deliberately avoided anything that would judge the value of creative work. Instead, I focused on structural adjustments—how content fits within a blog post architecture, interlinking, SEO metadata, formatting. Just the mechanical parts.
Creativity, disruption, the thing that make Fight Club a cornerstone of our modern culture—that remains human territory.
If you’re using AI to evaluate whether your book is good, whether your movie will resonate, whether your art has value, you’re asking the Cannes critics of 1999 to predict the cultural impact of Fight Club. The answer will be wrong. Always. And it has to be wrong.
Real excellence is something that breaks the model. This is why it’s important to maintain your own quirks, outside of AI. To keep experimenting. To keep making mistakes, correcting them, and starting over. Even when it’s exhausting. Even when it feels like you’re going nowhere.
Because what is personal—what is yours, what is specific to your life experience and how you see the world through your own eyes—that is the value you bring to the world. No model was trained on that. No algorithm can evaluate it.
Keep working on it. Even when there are no visible results yet.
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