The new luxury isn't what's hard to produce

A Mercedes-Maybach ad rolled across my feed this week: Floating, brutalist architecture. A surreal, otherworldly desert. A woman in future-couture watching the car like an apparition. It's as if the car came straight out of a Villeneuve film.

The campaign is made to impress. But my first thought wasn't "wow." I was wondering: "Is this AI?" Most likely not. Produced the classic way, this probably was a long, brutally expensive CGI battle, the kind only a brand like Mercedes-Maybach could ever afford.

And for a long time, that was the whole idea behind luxury advertising: Cost is the message. Visible effort signals exclusivity. Spectacle stands in for meaning. But the reflex has changed. It used to be "How did they do that?" Now it's: "Which AI tool did they use?"

And that question kills the magic. Because soon, anyone can make this on a laptop, on a Tuesday. The spectacle stops meaning anything, it's becoming a commodity.

What's left is harder to fake. A brand's own symbols, conflicts, characters, rituals. A thought that couldn't have come from anyone else, one that doesn't sound like the most probable output of an AI-model.

The new luxury isn't what's hard to produce. It's what's hard to copy.