Age to be imperfect
In the AI era, flaw is not failure -- it's human signature
In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue, and our belief in human supremacy over machines took a big blow. The ancient game of chess, created in India and perfected by other civilisations, was always regarded as the highest theatre of pure human intelligence. But, now, it had been conquered by a machine, and since then, the machine has only become more ubiquitously powerful. Today a decent chess engine on a mobile phone can defeat the strongest human grandmaster. Magnus Carlsen or Praggnanandhaa are not better than Stockfish, and no human being ever will be.
And yet, playing chess became even more popular.
Increasing number of people watch Carlsen and Pragga play each other. They watch because the point of human chess was never only the perfect move, but it was also the vulnerability of two humans like us who would hesitate, miscalculate, panic and improvise, get tired, and then suddenly find a move that felt like magic. It was human drama they want, and machine-like perfection of two computers playing each other would leave them cold, the very antithesis of drama.
This peculiar quest for imperfection may become the defining truth of the AI age.
We have spent the last few years asking whether AI can write, draw, code, and create as well as human beings. Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes, or at least close enough, for most practical purposes. AI can write a clean LinkedIn post, generate a hummable song, produce a perfectly structured memo, make a McKinsey-like slide, and finish off by summarising all of it in a competent email. It is fluent, smooth, tireless, often near perfect; an almost 10 out of 10.
The problem is that we may soon become sick of the 10 out of 10.
We are already seeing this in the plague of AI slop on LinkedIn. You can spot it from a mile away: the smooth opening line, the neat three lessons, the inspirational paragraph, the carefully balanced humility, the “here is what it taught me” ending. It is grammatically correct and emotionally dead. In response, we have begun hunting for posts that are messy, opinionated, oddly structured, perhaps even badly punctuated, but unmistakably written by someone who has lived that thought.
The same is happening with books. Amazon is reportedly flooded with AI-generated titles, many polished but soulless. As a result, we increasingly look for books from known publishers rather than self-published ones as a signal of human authorship. In such a world, the value of a human book lies not just in how well it is written, but in how clearly it has been felt. When text becomes infinite, real authorship becomes scarce.
This phenomenon is not new. Human beings have always valued the mark of the hand. A machine can make a perfect ceramic bowl, smooth, symmetrical, and identical to the next thousand bowls. But we often pay more for the potter’s bowl precisely because it is not perfect. The uneven lip, the thumbprint, the minor dent or the slight tilt in the body of the pot: these are not defects, but provenance, signalling that a human hand passed through here.
The Japanese have a phrase for this: wabi-sabi, the beauty of something that is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, and thus its art of kintusugi, where a broken pot is mended back together with gold lacquer. In India, we have our own instinctive version of it. We have the nazar battu, the small black spot on a baby’s face or the fiercely ugly face mask hung above doors. Perfect beauty feels dangerous, almost inhuman. Persian carpet makers were said to leave a flaw in their carpets because perfection belonged only to God. The flaw was not a failure, but a human signature.
Great art has always understood this. Picasso did not paint faces the way a passport camera sees faces. M F Husain did not draw horses like they should look like; his horses were restless, elongated, full of motion rather than anatomy, with their power not coming from accuracy, but from distortion.
AI will become very good at beauty, with symmetrical faces, flawless prose, balanced compositions, and correct answers. But beauty is not the same as perfection; it is in the cracked note of a singer, the pause before an actor remembers a line, and the grandmother who never measured anything but always got the dish right.
This is why author Sangeet Paul Choudary’s says that “in the age of AI, humans will become a luxury good”. He uses the example of a wine sommelier whose knowledge, selection, and cork-sniffing performance is what we pay a premium for in a restaurant. Similarly, we pay a huge premium to go to a live concert over a Spotify rendition. When machine output becomes abundant and cheap, human output becomes premium not because it is more perfect, but because it carries unmistakable human presence and lived experience.
The mistake humans will make in the AI age is to compete with machines on the finish and polish. The worst thing a writer or artist can do now is try to sound like AI, as many of us are doing on our LinkedIn posts - sounding smooth, agreeable, optimised and dead. The winners will be those who become more themselves, not less. Authenticity will always win over efficiency.
We began with chess, so let us end with football. Imagine if the current World Cup played by perfect AI robots. There would be no misplaced passes or bad tackles, nerves or exhaustion, no striker missing from two yards, and no Messi walking for 70 minutes and then suddenly bending spacetime. It would be technically astonishing and emotionally hollow.
In a world where machines can generate perfection on demand, the most valuable thing a human being may do is remain unmistakably, recognisably imperfect.