Happy Thursday! 

I gasped when I saw the Gap x Sandy Liang collection, but I was even more surprised when I saw what people were talking about in regards to the collaboration. If you can believe it, Gap has created cultural conversation again — this time because they used an artist to illustrate the promo video. It seems simple enough, but I think the discourse has really touched on something promising in the creative landscape. More below, and subscribe to the Yapper tier so you don’t miss it. 

Also in this newsletter: the kind of influencer drama that’ll bring you back to the heyday of tea channels, the Red Scare podcast seems to be teasing an interview with far-far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, and a controversial cliffhanger from the Wizards of Waverly Place spin-off.

This week has felt like a particularly charged one in regards to artificial intelligence. As AI has become more ubiquitous and ingrained in every part of our lives, the one silver lining among these slop clouds has been that people are especially celebratory about human-made work. 

Capping off a week full of AI slop discourse, which I briefly touched on in Monday’s newsletter, people have been raving about the promotional video for the upcoming Gap x Sandy Liang collab. Why, you ask? Well, besides the actual clothes (which include the most perfect trench coat that I will be attempting to buy), consumers love that the animated teaser was made by a real, flesh and blood artist. 

Scrolling through TikTok, I saw just as many videos about the art for the collaboration as I did about the actual collection itself. Creators remarked on how artist Annie Choi’s animation was effective at storytelling. It captures specific details about Sandy Liang’s mythology and her girlhood-inspired designs. 

The Studio Ghibli-like animation style also stands in stark contrast to the Ghibli AI slop memes that went viral earlier this year. There is heart and character to the animated Gap campaign that is absent from those GPT-4o-generated ones. It’s promising that audiences and consumers feel that difference. It suggests that people still understand and are moved by art made by real people with real points of view. People aren’t totally buying the idea put forth by AI founders like Sam Altman that this technology is “democratizing” art. This is because, thankfully, people understand that art is not just about form or final product. It’s also about intention and expression.