What is creativity without sweat and tears?

Creative output has traditionally required effort — hours spent staring down the empty page, crumpled drafts tossed in the trash. But through years or decades of dedicated toil, one could achieve mastery and derive meaning from one’s accomplishments. Generative AI is poised to change that equation. Can we derive meaning from art produced with no effort? 

The Gazette asked philosophers and psychiatrists about the value of struggle itself — and what we lose if there’s an easier way out. Their comments have been edited for length and clarity. 

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Different philosophers of action have different views about what exactly trying is, and people will disagree about the relevance of how hard you tried and how creditworthy you are of the eventual results. 

Some people — and this is not my view — think, for example, that if somebody is a natural at something, like if they’re a virtuoso violin player, then the very fact that the person is not trying hard is part of what’s so impressive. People with that kind of view are not going to be so worried about not trying hard per se as a curtailment on an accomplishment. 

That’s not my view. I love trying hard. I think there are lots and lots of cases in which it just seems intuitive that the resources that somebody invests in pursuit of a goal redound to the person’s credit and make the result something that reflects more well on the person. And when I say resources, I’m thinking about the obvious things like time and money, but I’m also thinking about the more intangible, harder-to-measure things like cognitive resources or emotional resources. 

Now, there are contexts where it only matters that the outcome is good: What matters is just that you get results and the output serves some purpose, and it doesn’t matter so much that it reflects really well on you. Those are the kinds of cases in which outsourcing is fine. But there are other arenas in which I want the work to reflect well on me. I don’t just care that the paper is good or is right: It matters to me that I wrote it. 

I just want to give one caveat. There are also cases in which it doesn’t seem plausible that adding extra effort is a good idea. It’s not like effort is an end in itself, regardless of the good of the goal that you’re trying to attain. It’s like trying hard but not smart: I’m wasting my resources by unnecessarily flinging them into a dumb direction. So the hard question always for us as finite beings is the question about resource management. There are some kinds of outsourcing that make sense in context because they free up resources that we can better use elsewhere. We just have to accept the fact that we might not deserve as much credit for certain of these outcomes. 

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I work with chatbots quite a bit just to see where they’re at. Anthropic’s Claude is my favorite. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that as of now, Claude has co-author status. At the highest level of philosophical inquiry, you can feed very sophisticated lines of reasoning and ask Claude for commentary, and Claude is there, Claude can do it. Writing books the way we have been writing books no longer makes much sense. Anybody who wants to write a book will write a much better book and will do it much faster with an AI co-author. It’s an absolutely stunning situation. 

But I deliberately chose the word ‘co-author.’ You’re not outsourcing the work away; there’s just more going on. We are definitely not at a stage where you would just read whatever Claude puts together and then take it at face value; you still need a person who can judge it. 

People of my generation, with my level of education, are the perfect people to use this technology. We’ve learned what we know without anything like AI. I know how to read a text by myself, I know how to do the research. But I worry that 50 years from now we’ll only have people who learned with these devices present, and it will be harder and harder to motivate people to get an education, both in order to judge what the devices are doing and also in order to live up to ideas of human excellence. 

Some people inherently care about acquiring skills for the sake of acquiring skills. But most people have a lazier attitude. We need to motivate future generations to maintain the level of human excellence that previous generations have made possible, even though it is easy to outsource it. We need to find ways of focusing on living a distinctly human life, maintaining standards of distinctly human excellence, simply because they are the standards of distinctly human excellence. 

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Nearly all of the main competitors will agree that a typical good life for a human will involve a struggle for achievement. It’ll involve hard work toward some end. But the theories disagree about why. 

Maybe hard work is good for us because it’s pleasant to arrive at the end. Some theories posit that it’s getting what you want that’s good. And then still others come at it hyper-directly: They say, independently of how it feels at the end, it’s good for us to have the experience of sacrificing and then succeeding, to do actual labor and have it pay off. 

But this technology makes it more realistic that you can divorce the labor from the outcome. If the only thing that matters for flourishing is feeling good, then maybe all we really need is frictionless dopamine hits. You can chat with your romance bot just as frictionlessly as you can access gambling sites and pornography sites. You can read whatever fiction you want the chatbot to spill out, without putting in any intellectual work to explore and discover on your own. There is a very serious way in which these pieces of technology can make vivid why philosophical theorizing about welfare could end up mattering a lot. 

It’s all well and good to think about how AI could optimize our labor in some specific use case. There are all kinds of use cases that I have no pessimism about whatsoever: solving protein folding, doing targeted drug discovery. All of that is incredible. But I do worry about the use cases that are more general.

If you listen to the technologists themselves, we’re talking about a massive social experiment in which the ways that we have been organizing our lives for hundreds of years are massively upended. If that’s what’s going on, then I think we had better pay a lot of attention to the typical human response to that. We want to be careful not to massively disrupt what seems like part of an ordinary human experience. 

We need to go back to basics. The whole project has to be oriented around what is conducive to human flourishing. Maybe we’re better off writing our own emails. Maybe we’re better off having slightly suboptimal solutions in various spaces so long as we retain the elements that are core to ordinary human interaction. 

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In the study of adult development, people talk a lot about being proud of what they did. Some people were proud of winning awards or becoming CEO — those things are nice — but what really endured was the sense of, “I did good work, and it meant something to me, and it meant something to other people.” 

So I do think that there was a kind of pride in working hard, in working diligently. It’s a kind of ethic. Sure, there are people who are happy to get away with doing as little as possible. Maybe not as many of those people are attracted to places like Harvard; it’s kind of a self-selecting group. But a lot of what’s important for many of us is the sense of, “I got better at this. I learned to do this. I learned to do it well.” There’s something satisfying about it. 

I use AI sometimes. I put some writing into AI and say, “Make this better,” and it does. And then I feel guilty. It did in three seconds what might have taken me an hour. My God, I spent all these years honing my writing skills. I went to public school in Des Moines, Iowa, and we had to write an essay every week. I agonized over that stuff, and I got better at it. When I was 12 and having to write that weekly essay, if you had told me I could not do it, of course, I would have said, “Great!” But now I’m glad that they made me do it. 

So part of it is this skill development I feel proud of. But it’s not just the writing: It’s thinking. Does the first part of this sentence logically lead to the second? It’s a way of honing our ability to think, not just to string words together. What if we don’t have to do that anymore? 

I practice Zen, and Zen very much emphasizes each moment. How do you want to spend your moments? I could be retired now. I don’t need to keep working. But I’m working because I really get satisfaction from doing the work we do. I think there is some intrinsic satisfaction in the journey, not just the destination.