AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The struggle is what makes it count, what gives it weight.1

This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is... See more