Create What Cannot Be Optimized

Maybe one response to generative AI is not another list of things we must refuse, but a list of things we stubbornly continue doing even after they become economically irrational. Write the paragraph yourself although a model can produce a cleaner one in twelve seconds. Draw badly. Learn three chords and annoy your neighbors. Read the whole difficult book instead of extracting its argument. Make something obscure, excessive, amateurish, unmonetizable and entirely unnecessary.

Not because human production carries some mystical purity that machines contaminate. Plenty of human art is dreadful and plenty of AI output is useful. The point is that making something changes the maker. Writing is not merely an inefficient method for obtaining text. Drawing is not merely a cumbersome route to an image. Reading is not an antiquated information-retrieval protocol. These activities exercise attention, judgment, taste, patience, imagination and the peculiar ability to remain with something before knowing exactly what it will become. If we preserve only the outputs while outsourcing the practices that produced them, we have preserved the least interesting half.

So make things the inefficient way sometimes. Not as nostalgia, purity politics or some bourgeois artisanal fantasy about handcrafted authenticity, but because capabilities survive through use. Capital has always been interested in the product and rather less interested in what producing it does to the person. Perhaps we should be interested in precisely that. Some things are worth making ourselves because the thing being made is not only the thing in front of us. It is also us.