When Creation Becomes Cheap

A few days ago, my wife, daughter and I were talking about something quite ordinary.

My daughter made a passing comment that caught my attention.

She said that wherever she looked, posters seemed to be AI-generated.

That surprised me.

Not because I disagreed with her.

I had been noticing something similar myself.

Once you spend enough time around these tools, you start seeing AI everywhere.

In the writing.

In the images.

In profile photographs.

But hearing my daughter notice it made me wonder whether something broader was happening.

I had already started feeling a kind of fatigue with many AI-generated images.

Maybe it is just me, but it made me think.

It wasn't that they were bad.

The problem was that after a while they started to feel familiar.

Different image.

Different subject.

But somehow the same feeling.

My first instinct was simple.

Maybe AI just wasn't genuinely creative.

It could analyse enormous amounts of existing material, recognise patterns, combine styles and create variations.

But perhaps real creativity required something else.

Something genuinely new.

The more I thought about that, the less satisfied I became with the explanation.

Humans do not create from nothing either.

We all build on what came before us.

So saying that AI learns from existing material does not settle the question of whether it can be creative.

Maybe I was looking at the wrong problem.

Maybe what was bothering me was not creativity.

Maybe it was abundance.

When something that once required considerable time, skill or effort suddenly becomes almost effortless to produce, we do not simply produce the same amount more efficiently.

We produce much more.

That changes things.

I started thinking about email.

There was a time when sending someone a written message required effort.

You wrote a letter.

You addressed it.

You bought a stamp.

You posted it.

I still remember how personal some of those letters felt.

Maybe part of that was because of the effort involved.

You had to stop.

Think.

Decide what you really wanted to say.

And then write it down.

Email removed almost all of that friction.

That was an extraordinary improvement.

It also helped create inboxes full of messages we never asked for.

Email did not make communication worse.

It made communication cheap enough that we eventually needed spam filters to protect ourselves from the abundance it created.

Now there is so much communication that we are beginning to use AI to tell us which messages deserve our attention.

That progression interests me.

The printing press made reproduction cheaper.

The internet made publishing cheaper.

Email made distribution cheaper.

AI is making creation cheaper.

And when one part of a system becomes dramatically easier, the problem often moves somewhere else.

For a long time, producing something was itself a kind of filter.

Writing an article took time.

Making a photograph required equipment and skill.

Producing a video required people and effort.

Building software required knowing how to code.

Those barriers were not always good.

They excluded people.

They made creation harder.

But when I say harder, I do not only mean expensive in money.

I mean effort.

AI changes that.

If competent text, images, video, music and software become much easier to produce, we are going to produce far more of them.

I think we already are.

And that changes the question.

It is no longer only:

Can this be made?

Increasingly, at least for me, it becomes:

Is this worth making?

And for everyone on the receiving end:

Is this worth my attention?

There is another reason this has become uncomfortable for me.

I am part of it.

I am using AI to write this series.

The experiences are mine.

The questions are mine.

Usually I begin with something incomplete.

A memory.

A conversation.

Something I read.

A question that has been bothering me.

Sometimes just a badly formed thought.

AI helps me research it, challenge it and find clearer language for it.

There is no question that this makes writing process easier for me.

I can explore an idea faster.

I can test an argument faster.

That is useful.

But it also leaves me with exactly the same question I am asking about the wider world.

Just because I can produce another piece, should I?

That may be a more useful question for me whenever I want to write.

Was there actually something worth saying in the first place?

Did I have a question I genuinely cared about?

And after all of that, am I willing to stand behind what I publish?

For me, that is becoming the test.

For a long time, making something was difficult.

We may be moving into a world where making something is the easy part.

The harder part is deciding why we want to make it.

And whether it is worth someone else's attention.

Because the more I think about it, the more I come back to something very simple.

Time may be the most valuable thing a reader gives you.

If someone gives me a few minutes of theirs, I should have something worth saying.