AI That Makes You Feel Something

Let's talk about the AI discourse for a second.

If you've been following the conversation--on Twitter, in the press, around the proverbial water cooler--you've noticed it's dominated by one question:

"Will AI take my job?"

It's a reasonable question. GPT-4 can pass the bar exam. Midjourney can generate images that look like they took a human artist days. Code assistants are writing functions faster than most programmers can type.

But here's the thing: this framing is exhausting. And it's missing something important.

There's another question--a better one--that almost nobody is asking:

"Will AI make me feel something?"

Will it make me laugh? Make me cry? Help me create something I'm proud of? Give me an experience I'll remember?

This is the question that excites us. And we think it's where some of the most valuable AI companies will be built.

The Productivity Trap

Most AI discourse is stuck in a productivity frame.

"AI will make you 10x more productive." "AI will automate repetitive tasks." "AI will help you write emails faster, analyze spreadsheets faster, schedule meetings faster."

Faster, faster, faster.

Here's the problem: productivity has a ceiling.

There's only so much faster you can write an email. Once it takes 10 seconds instead of 5 minutes, you've captured most of the value. Going from 10 seconds to 5 seconds is marginal.

And here's the dirty secret of productivity tools: people don't actually want to be more productive. They want to feel like they're being productive. That's why productivity porn is such a huge genre--people watching videos about Notion setups they'll never use, buying planners they'll abandon by February.

Creative tools are different.

Creativity is a Frontier

When you help someone create, you're not optimizing an existing task. You're unlocking capability they didn't have before.

The person who uses Midjourney isn't doing their existing work faster. They're doing new work--work they couldn't do before because they couldn't draw, couldn't afford a designer, didn't have time to learn Photoshop.

The person who uses Suno to make a song isn't replacing a music production workflow. They're becoming a musician for the first time.

This is fundamentally different from productivity AI. It's not about efficiency. It's about expansion.

And the market size? Infinite. Because the output of creative tools isn't a faster email--it's a new creation that didn't exist before. The TAM isn't "people who write emails." It's "people who have something to express"--which is everyone.

Slop as a Feature

There's a term in AI circles: "slop."

Slop is the AI content that floods your feeds. The generated images that don't quite make sense. The hallucinated text. The weird artifacts. It's become an insult--a way to dismiss AI-generated content as low-quality noise.

But here's a contrarian take: slop is a feature when you control it.

The "mistakes" of generative AI--the unexpected outputs, the bizarre combinations--these are features when you're creating, not bugs.

Creativity is about serendipity. It's about stumbling onto something unexpected. The best ideas often come from accidents.

Generative AI is an accident machine. It produces outputs no human would produce. Sometimes those outputs are garbage. But sometimes they're sparks--starting points that a human creator can refine into something genuinely new.

The artists using Midjourney don't just type a prompt and ship the output. They iterate. They guide. They treat the AI as a collaborator--one with very different aesthetics than their own. The slop becomes raw material.

Willingness to Pay

Here's a simple market observation: people pay more for entertainment than enterprise.

Netflix is $15/month. Spotify is $10/month. A concert is $100+. A video game is $60.

Compare that to productivity tools. Notion is $10/month. Superhuman--considered expensive--is $30/month.

Why the difference?

Entertainment and creative tools tap into identity. When you use Midjourney, you're not just generating images--you're becoming someone who creates art. When you use Suno, you're becoming a musician.

Identity is priceless. Or rather, it's priced at a premium.

The Investment Thesis

What are we looking for in Sloptimism?

Creation over consumption. We want AI that puts tools in users' hands, not AI that replaces users. Amplification of human expression, not automation.

Emotion as the metric. Does the product make people feel something? Pride? Joy? Connection? If the primary emotion is "relief that the task is done," that's productivity software. If it's "I can't believe I made this," that's what we want.

Accessible to non-experts. Tools for everyone to become artists, not tools for professionals to be slightly faster.

Community and sharing. Creation is social. The best creative tools have network effects--people want to share what they make.

The AI that matters won't just make you more efficient.

It'll make you feel like an artist.

ADIN is an AI-powered venture network backing the future of technology. If you're building AI that makes people feel something, we want to hear from you.