Art, AI, and the Cult of Unnecessary Effort

Let’s get one thing straight: the value of a piece of art has nothing to do with how much the artist suffered to make it.

There's a weird, romantic myth that creativity requires toil. That for something to be meaningful, it must be born from struggle, sweat, and sleepless nights. It’s a narrative that keynote speakers love, but it’s nonsense. And it’s the same flawed logic driving the current panic about AI in the creative fields.

To me, it just feels familiar. It’s another moral panic about another new tool.

Thirty-five years ago, my new tool was a computer keyboard. Before that, my only option was a pen, and my relationship with handwriting was, to put it mildly, dysfunctional. Today, we’d call it Dysgraphia. Back then, it was just a personal failing. My teacher, in a moment of accidental, damning clarity, summed it up the day I decided to leave school at 14: “You’re an A* student, but you’re going to fail if you don’t improve your handwriting.”

The system gave me one interface to prove my knowledge, and that interface was broken for me. It didn’t matter what I knew; it only mattered if I could render it in legible cursive. So, I walked away from the system and found a better tool. The computer didn’t make me smarter. It just removed a stupid, arbitrary barrier.

This is why the backlash against AI feels so predictable. We’re again confusing the tool with the work and fetishizing the effort over the result. For centuries, we’ve built up this idea of the tortured genius. But do you stand in front of Starry Night and wonder about the precise number of brushstrokes? Do you watch Alien and try to calculate Ridley Scott’s overtime hours? Of course not. You care about the result. You value the art for its resonance, its impact—not the grind it took to produce.

Creativity isn't brute force. It's a series of decisions. Art is curation.

When I’m making music, I’m not just hitting notes; I’m choosing which ideas to explore, which sounds to discard, and which details to obsess over. The hard work isn’t in the physical act—it’s in the judgment. It's in the thousands of micro-decisions that shape a chaotic mess into something coherent.

AI doesn’t replace that process; it amplifies it. Like a synthesizer or a piece of editing software, it generates possibilities. Some are useful, many are garbage. The artist’s job doesn’t disappear—it shifts. It moves from manual generation to rigorous, intelligent curation. AI isn't the death of effort; it's a shift in where that effort is spent. You just trade one kind of work for another.

Then there’s the plagiarism argument—the claim that AI is fundamentally theft because its models are trained on existing work. This is a misunderstanding of how the technology actually works. A model doesn't store copies of the images or texts it learns from. It abstracts patterns from them, distilling concepts into a vast, complex web of mathematical weights and biases. It’s not a plagiarist; it’s an inspiration engine. It’s doing what human artists have always done: learning from the world of influences around it and synthesizing something new.

Now, should the artists whose work contributes to these models be recognized and compensated? Absolutely. That’s a practical question of ethics, fairness, and infrastructure that we need to solve. But it's a problem to be fixed, not a philosophical reason to reject the technology outright.

Letting go of the idea that grind defines art is liberating. It allows us to focus on what actually matters. When I sit down to create, I’m not thinking about how hard I’m working. I’m thinking about what I want to say. The value of creativity lies not in the effort spent, but in the meaning made.

AI doesn’t diminish art; it reframes it. It strips away the romanticism and reveals what was always true: the real work is in the vision, the taste, and the judgment. It’s a better tool. It doesn’t replace the artist—it amplifies them. And that’s a future I’m ready to get on with.