The Scratch on the Vinyl — and the Guy Who Got There Six Hours Early
Vinyl died when CDs offered “perfect” reproduction. Right?! That’s when streaming made the “perfect” free to the world.
But wait… vinyl came back, and precisely because the imperfections prove that it’s real.
As my longtime friend Micah Voraritskul says, “Human is the new vinyl.”
Micah works with a lot of executives and name-brand organizations. He says that when AI makes “perfect” content free, trust becomes your competitive advantage. As he likes to say, “The scratch proves authenticity.”
Micah got into this work because he saw the problem before most people even knew it was a problem.
March 22, 2023: Six hours early to the party.
Micah gets an email from Jeremy Cowart, one of the world’s most recognized photographers.
Subject: “Houston, We Have a Problem.”
AI-generated portraits were fooling Cowart’s trained professional eye.
Most people wouldn’t get why that mattered.
Micah did.
Within weeks, he founded VerifiedHuman™.
He didn’t wait for consensus.
He didn’t wait for headlines.
He built the solution 18 months before the mainstream conversation started.
Today, VerifiedHuman™ certifies creators across 25+ countries on six continents.
That early move wasn’t luck. It came from foresight, clarity, and a deep love for the humans doing human content creation.
Micah understood what always happens when a new technology promises perfection at scale: human work gets overshadowed by hype—and then it becomes the premium product. To be clear, Micah isn’t anti-AI; he’s pro-human; pro-trust.
That’s the thesis of his book Human Is the New Vinyl: when AI produces perfect content for free, the value shifts to what can’t be faked.
Which raises the question leaders should steal from him: What are we protecting while we change?
Organizations that win won’t be the ones using AI the fastest.
They’ll be the ones who know what they must not lose as they adapt.
As Micah likes to say, “The scratch isn’t the flaw. It’s the proof.”
If you’re inclined, check him out or reach out:
https://www.micahvoraritskul.com
[ micah@verifiedhuman.info and https://www.linkedin.com/in/micahvoraritskul/ ]
