A common critique of AI-generated design and copy: it's generic, baseline, uninspired. If it doesn't move you, it hasn't succeeded.
That's a fine-art standard. Commercial work was never trying to meet it.
A pricing page isn't judged by whether it's beautiful. It's judged by whether someone understands the product and decides to try it. A landing page that explains value clearly, builds enough trust, and ships in a day instead of three weeks hasn't failed at being art. It was never trying to be art.
The same argument, minus the romance
None of this is new. Designers and writers have made the "craft vs. commerce" argument for decades, long before AI existed. What's strange is how quickly the argument reverts to romantic language the moment AI enters the picture — taste, soul, human touch — as if the presence of a machine automatically reframes commercial work as something that should be judged like art.
The same reversal happens in translation. Commercial translation exists to serve a business purpose: an email, a product page, a support article. Most people in the industry would agree that much of this work can be functional, conventional, even generic. But mention marketing copy, and the standard quietly changes. Suddenly the language shifts to voice, nuance, and the human touch, as if commercial copy had become literature. The purpose of the content — what it's supposed to make someone understand or do — gets replaced by the translator's own aesthetic judgment of what "good" language looks like.
Two questions, not one
In both cases, the confusion runs the same direction. Work made for a commercial purpose gets evaluated by a fine-art standard, usually by people trained to make that judgment professionally. Taste is a real skill. It's just answering a different question than the one commercial work is required to answer.
The two questions are simple to tell apart, once separated:
Is it aesthetically distinctive? That's a taste question.
Does it achieve the commercial purpose? That's a different question entirely.
Neither answer determines the other. AI-generated work may be generic. It does not follow that it has low market value. Market value depends on whether the work achieves its purpose, not whether it impresses another designer, writer, or translator.