The new cost of creation

We’re all processing this moment together.

Every day, AI makes something possible that would have seemed absurd a year ago. It’s tempting to look at this newfound abundance and conclude that the cost of creation is approaching zero.

I think that gets it wrong.

AI has made execution extraordinarily cheap. But the straightest path to an output is often painfully obvious and uninteresting.

As our ability to execute increases, our sensitivity for “AI slop” increases along with it. People want to give their attention to something that is deserving of it. And beneath all the familiar tells of AI slop, I think we’re reacting to the absence of two things: effort and vision.

Effort

Effort is evidence that it took orders of magnitude longer to create something that it takes for people to consume it. The closer the gap between creation and consumption, the more disposable the artifact becomes. Creators should aspire to pour unreasonable effort into their work if they care about longevity.

AI is an alluring shortcut but it threatens to shorten the lifespan of your creations, so you must augment it with something else: more, better, deeper execution that only you would bother to do. The extra passes are the things that give a piece weight and make a stranger stop and think, “how did they do this?”

I’m reminded of Penn and Teller’s definition of magic:

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

If you’re shooting for magic —and you should always shoot for magic— AI is a dangerous veneer. It helps you take the first step but disguises it as the final one. You must keep going past what appears to be “done.” That’s the job now. Doing this successfully will make the work feel like it came from you and not from the undifferentiated blur of everything.

Vision

Vision is the window into the creator’s worldview, pressed up against the glass of the consumer’s experience. Your answer to the question of how the future could look or the quality of the journey to get there, is what defines your vision. You have to bring yourself into the gap between what is and what could be. That’s the entire point of making: to smuggle your way of seeing into someone else’s day.

We exist to connect with others. Creation is simply an act of manifestation. Depending on how you wield it, AI can muddle that story because it is inherently derivative. Working with AI means fighting the oppressive weight of the lowest common denominator in favor of something new, or at least something personal.

Slop slips in when you lean on mechanics that aren’t you: a borrowed adverb like “quietly,” a prefab structure like “it’s not just X, it’s Y,” or an all-too-familiar art style. There’s a growing list of tells that subtly communicate to others, “this isn’t you,” and that’s when they start to disengage.

You owe them a piece of yourself in exchange for their most valuable asset: their attention.

In the end, cheap output is the least interesting thing about this moment. What fascinates me is that effort and vision have now become nakedly obvious. When something ships (and new things ship all the time), you can feel how far someone went past the first pass.

The cost of creation hasn’t gone to zero. We’ve just been measuring the wrong thing.

As execution gets cheaper, the new cost of creation becomes your judgment, your willingness to keep going, and your ability to see something worth making in the first place.

The path forward is simple and hard at the same time: push the effort further than feels reasonable, and make the vision unmistakably yours.