I’ve been thinking a lot about why the obviously AI-generated stuff on our feeds feels so terrible and offensive.
I see a lot of very genuine upset and confusion every day, online and in person.
However.
I don’t think it’s because AI can be confidently wrong, though it obviously can be. People are confidently wrong all the time, especially online where the incentives to be fast often outweigh the truth.
I don’t think it’s because the writing is objectively “bad.” Personal tastes aside, people publish stuff that’s worse all the time and we skip right past it.
I don’t even think it’s because it’s inauthentic. Ghost-writing has existed forever. PR firms write executive posts. Speechwriters put words in politicians’ mouths. We’ve always accepted that what’s published and what’s personally authored aren’t always the same thing. Even though, for my own writing, I feel strongly that they should be.
I think it’s because a longstanding social contract has been broken.
Creating was harder than consuming, until now
Think about what it costs to make something versus receive it. Time, effort, or both. Sometimes the gap is so narrow it rounds to zero. Other times it’s enormous.
But the pattern is pretty clear.
- It takes more time to make a movie than to watch it. In most cases, we’re talking orders of magnitude.
- It takes more time to write an article than to read one.
- It takes more time to record a song than to listen to it.
You get the idea?
Even in a real conversation, we spend roughly the same time together.
The contract: I spent at least as much time on this as I’m asking of you.
AI-generated content breaks that contract.
Creation takes less time and effort than consuming, and even when we can’t name it, it feels fundamentally disrespectful.
If you choose to use AI to do less work, that’s on you. But don’t be surprised when people get mad.
Raise your own bar of what’s possible, or worth trying.
But don’t ask the recipients of your work to try harder than you did.
You broke the contract.
P.S. This was written by me, and I know I spent more time on it than you did reading it. But I hope because of that ratio, you think about it for a lot longer.