Microsoft recently aired an ad for their Copilot AI service in which an individual uses it to copy the work of a musician they like to “create” similar music. (There’s a whole subtext of racism in this ad which I won’t address here.) It’s incredibly disturbing: they’re literally selling AI as a tool to steal other people’s work. It’s probably the most honest ad for AI I’ve seen. It makes it abundantly clear that generative AI really is for people who want the accomplishments without having to do the work to earn them. It’s infuriatingly self-entitled.
The best artists I’ve ever known—the most talented, most accomplished, most dedicated—didn’t care about success: They love doing the work. The work is the reward. The work itself is the source of joy and satisfaction, not the final product. You can’t create great things if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort.
Also: Good luck getting your lucky break in a work flooded by AI slop. It’s hard enough to get your work noticed in normal circumstances, and so much of success is down the whether you’re lucky enough to get your big break at all. Everyone’s just going to end up buried now. GenAI makes it less and less likely for anyone to find success.
I find myself thinking a lot lately about the history of cheat codes in games. I think this may be key to understanding the motives of people who are building and pushing AI.
We’ve had several decades now where the goal in certain corners of gaming culture has been to find the cheat code. Finding the cheat code makes you clever. It makes you smarter than people who play through without it—the assumption being those losers are too dumb to find the code. Seems like a lot of people want AI to be their cheat code for life. A lot of people seem to believe they deserve success because they’re clever enough to find a way around having to do the work.
Just like with creativity, these folk entirely fail to imagine that doing the work to earn the reward is what makes the reward worth it. That putting in the effort to attain mastery is an incredibly satisfying experience.
Of course this has roots far beyond just gaming culture: For my entire life, business culture has been hyper-focused on finding ways to maximize the profit and wealth of owners and shareholders while minimizing how hard they have to work for it: “I don’t work for my money, I make my money work for me!” Get rich quick schemes are the dream, the ideal. It’s how smart, clever people get rich. Doing the work is for suckers!
If our tools are supposed to make our work easier, it’s easy to think we should make tools to just do the work for us. There’s a lot of appeal here when it comes to drudgery and mindless task-based work. But creative work is different. The reward of creating something is the work itself. It’s how we grow and learn and become. The act of creativity is an act, it’s not an output. People who want to use genAI to shortcut the creative process fundamentally fail to understand what creativity is.
AI is just the latest in a long line of easy money schemes. No wonder the bubble is set to burst, just like so many times before.
