Artificial intelligence is forcing brands to rethink what makes people care.
Beauty as a Signal in Cannabis Marketing
For years, beautiful branding did more than capture our attention.
It communicated something.
A beautifully composed photograph, an intricate illustration, or a thoughtfully designed package wasn’t just visually appealing. It was evidence that someone had invested time into creating it.
Behind every image were hours of sketching, photographing, refining, revising, and starting over again. Beauty wasn’t simply the outcome. It was evidence of the craft behind it.
Over time, we began to associate beauty with care. Not because perfection was the goal, but because creating something exceptional required a level of effort that few people were willing, or able, to invest.
Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed that relationship.
Today, imagery that once took weeks or months to create can be produced in minutes. The technical barrier to producing something visually impressive has dropped almost overnight, giving individuals and small businesses access to creative capabilities that were once out of reach.
And that’s genuinely exciting, but it also forces us to reconsider something we may have taken for granted.
If beauty is no longer evidence of effort, what is it that we’re actually responding to?
What Beauty Represents in Cannabis Marketing
Maybe that’s what we’ve misunderstood all along.
Maybe it was never beauty itself that pulled us in, but what beauty represented.
When we describe something as beautiful, we’re rarely talking only about what we see. Think about the moments that stay with you most. A sunrise at the end of a long hike, a favourite song playing during a road trip, a photograph from a family vacation. None of those things are meaningful simply because they’re visually or technically perfect. They’re meaningful because of the memories, emotions, and experiences we’ve attached to them.
Perhaps that’s why artists continue to paint sunsets, and photographers continue to chase golden hour. They’re rarely trying to document something the world has never seen before. They’re trying to capture a feeling. They’re hoping that someone else will look at that image and recognize a piece of themselves within it.
I think branding has always worked in much the same way.
The brands we remember rarely stay with us because they had the most beautiful packaging or the most impressive photography. They stay with us because those visuals become attached to something larger than themselves. A story. A philosophy. A sense of humour. A community.
They make us feel like there are real people behind what we’re looking at, and that what they’ve created exists for a reason beyond simply catching our attention.
That’s what made beautiful branding so powerful for so many years. The visuals weren’t the destination, they were an invitation into something deeper.
And perhaps that’s the part artificial intelligence can’t create on its own.
Because meaning has never existed in the image itself, it has always existed in the people looking at it.
The Story Behind the Brand in Cannabis: Mary Jane Berlin
That was the thought I kept coming back to after hearing about this year’s Mary Jane Berlin.
When our team returned, one observation surfaced again and again. They described walking past booths with striking illustrations, packaging that looked impeccably designed, and branding polished to a level that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. From a distance, many of them looked like the kind of brands you would naturally expect to draw a crowd.
Yet just as often, they found themselves moving on almost as quickly as they had stopped.
It wasn’t because the artwork wasn’t impressive. By all accounts, much of it was. What stayed with me wasn’t the quality of the visuals, but the question they raised. If everything looked this good, why did some booths leave such a lasting impression while others seemed to disappear almost as quickly as they had caught someone’s eye?
The more I thought about it, the less it felt like a conversation about artificial intelligence and the more it felt like a conversation about connection.
The brands that continued to come up weren’t necessarily the ones with the most elaborate illustrations. They were the ones that gave people something beyond the artwork to engage with.
There were photographs from the grow, conversations about genetics that had taken years to develop, founders explaining why they started cultivating in the first place, and teams sharing the philosophies and communities that shaped their products.
In those moments, the artwork wasn’t carrying the entire weight of the brand. It had become something else entirely.
It was an invitation into a story that already existed.
Is AI good for Cannabis Marketing? The Wrong Question
It also made me wonder if we’re asking the wrong question about artificial intelligence altogether.
The conversation so often revolves around whether AI can create beautiful images. At this point, that almost feels beside the point. It can. And with every new model, it’s becoming faster, more accessible, and more capable than the one before it.
The reality is that AI isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming one of the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever had access to. Choosing not to use it may eventually become as limiting as refusing to adopt digital photography or design software when they first emerged. The technology will continue to evolve whether we embrace it or not, and the brands that learn how to use it thoughtfully will almost certainly have an advantage.
But I don’t think the question was ever whether AI belongs in the creative process.
I think the question is what role we ask it to play.
Too often, we’re asking artificial intelligence to do the part of branding that has always belonged to people. We ask it to invent our personality, define our voice, create our identity, and tell our story. The results can be remarkable. Sometimes breathtaking.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s never been what makes a brand memorable.
The brands we carry with us aren’t remembered because they created beautiful imagery. They’re remembered because that imagery represented something real. Years spent refining a cultivar. Hard conversations. Shared values. Small victories that never made it onto social media. The people who shaped the business. The experiences that gave the brand its reason for existing in the first place.
Those things can’t be generated.
They must be lived.
And perhaps that’s where AI is at its most powerful.
Not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a tool that gives us more time to invest in the parts of creativity that only people can contribute. It can help us visualize ideas, remove technical barriers, speed up production, and bring ambitious concepts within reach of businesses that might never have been able to afford them before.
What it can’t do is tell us who we are. That responsibility still belongs to us.
Maybe that’s the future we’re moving toward.
One where artificial intelligence helps us capture someone’s attention, but human experience gives them a reason to stay.
Because when everything looks beautiful, beauty stops being the thing that sets us apart.
What remains is our story.
And that has always been, and perhaps always will be, profoundly human.
Last Updated on July 20, 2026 by Colin Bambury
