A recent Washington Post piece laid out just how quickly this happened after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Weekly English-language e-book releases on Amazon nearly tripled. More than 40% of tracks uploaded to Deezer are now fully AI-generated — around 75,000 songs a day. Scientific paper submissions to arXiv surged so fast the platform had to tighten its rules. And researchers estimate that up to a third of new web content may now be partly or fully AI-generated.
The article includes a line that resonated with me:
“Our world is built on an assumption that effort signals value.”
That assumption is starting to break.
For a long time, we unconsciously associated a book with years of work, a research paper with expertise, a song with practice. AI has quietly decoupled creation from effort. Something can now look complete, polished, and thoughtful — and have taken seconds. Paul Graham was actually saying the other day that if someone tells him a text was entirely written by AI, he immediately loses interest in reading it.
That’s astonishing.
It’s also a new kind of noise problem, and an attention problem. The easier creation becomes, the harder it may become to decide what deserves our time. We may soon discover that more software, more products, more content, and more features are not necessarily better, needed, or useful.
I keep thinking about what film directors often say when they talk about making movies: a film can take years of your life, thousands of hours. So you’d better truly need to tell that story, otherwise you’ll lose the energy to carry it through. You can often feel, while watching, when somebody genuinely needed to make something — and when they didn’t.
Paul Graham talks about “making something people desperately want” and founders having skin in the game. That idea feels more important now, not less. The easier creation becomes, the more audiences seem to search for signs that somebody genuinely cared — that whoever made this had a reason to.
AI can help produce the work. But humans still need to provide the reason for the work to exist.