In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

I am reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, slowly, in pieces, meeting over months with a book club that has become a load-bearing pillar of my intellectual community. I recommend it, the book and the book club both. Graeber and Wengrow introduced me to the idea of schismogenesis—the process of forming social divisions—which happens not by chance but through deliberate choices people make within an in-group to differentiate themselves from some out-group. The way Canadians define themselves in opposition to Americans, say. Or the way AI haters (complimentary) refuse to engage with generative AI.

It’s possible to see this with despair or derision: who are we becoming that even the use of tools and technologies has become a matter of identity? But the fun thing about reading anthropology is learning how much humans have always been Like This™. There were tribes who refused to adopt agriculture not because they didn’t know about it, but because the tribe up the road does agriculture and they’re not like them. Groups that refused to domesticate cattle because it was important to their group identity to see bulls as wild and untamed. I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI.

The promise of AI is that it removes friction. It doesn’t matter whether it can actually fulfill that promise, it matters that the sovereign wealth funds with seemingly infinite pockets and patience for Sam Altman’s megalomania believe it can. In their ideal world, you don’t have to think about anything because an AI will do your thinking for you, and so you can fire everyone whose job it was to think. In this ideal world, they never have to think about other people at all, whose desires and needs and rights might come into conflict with their whims. I don’t know where they imagine we’ll have gone; six feet under, probably.

I quite like thinking, and I think humans should do more of it, and I think the less we do it the more our thinking muscles will atrophy. This seems bad for everyone except for authoritarians who wish we were easier to control. I also happen to think AI is quite bad at thinking and that what LLMs do is not thinking at all, but that’s genuinely not the point. I do not want the frictionless world that the political project of generative AI promises, one in which you never have to interact with a human being if you don’t want to, and therefore I would simply prefer not to be complicit in its advancement.

My refusal is a philosophical position more than it is a practical one, in the same way that my decisions not to use Amazon or Netflix or Spotify do more to introduce friction into my life in service of an abstract ideal than it does to actually engender pain for the corporate oligarchs I despise. I harbour no delusion that my individual refusal will slow AI’s death drive to destroy societal trust and goodwill any more than I believe that Jeff Bezos is personally mourning money I’m not spending in his little shoppe. But if I am not capable of withstanding even this small amount of friction in my otherwise materially comfortable life for my ideals, what discomfort would I be able to endure when it matters more?

It is not virtuous to suffer, and discomfort is not noble. But everything in my life that is worth having, love and friendship and art and community, I found by fighting my way through discomfort. Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain. It is so easy in our rotten modernity to choose convenience and ease, to avoid friction at all costs and tell ourselves it is self-care. I choose the friction of refusal because I worry that if I forget how to be uncomfortable, I will forget how to grow. Refusal, like acquiescence, is habit-forming.

There are probably tasks that generative AI could help me do more quickly, if I can get over my fundamental moral disagreement with the technology. Maybe I would be able to fit more things into my life if I embraced it. But more does not always mean better, and abundance is not an uncomplicated good. We express our values and identities in what we choose to make time for, and the act of being forced to give some things up so you can prioritize other things, the realization that we cannot in fact have it all, that is what gives our choices meaning in the first place.

The thing that makes art interesting is that it was created by people who could have chosen to spend their time doing literally anything else. Do you know how long it takes to write a novel? Isn’t it amazing how many people have done it anyway? Every human-authored book in the world, even the ones I think are absolute trash and not worth the paper they’re printed on, is the culmination of hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of work by someone who had something they really, really wanted to say. Those are hundreds or maybe thousands of hours they could have chosen to spend hiking or cuddling their pets or socializing with their loved ones or playing Hades, but this thing they had to say was too important to ignore. I just think that’s neat.

The problem with AI output masquerading as art is not that it’s technically inept, or even uncanny. AI media generation has come a long way in the last five years and might well continue to improve technically. The problem with AI “art” is that it was not the expression of a mortal being choosing to spend its one wild and precious life clawing its way through mediocrity to try and imperfectly communicate a feeling with other mortal beings who, by definition, can never fully comprehend it, and therefore it is fundamentally uninteresting to me.

If you can push a button and get a screenplay or a symphony or a painting at the cost of a nominal subscription fee that does not begin to cover the true expense of this technology to the world, if you did not have to at least subconsciously face your mortality and decide that the pursuit of this piece of art is what you want to spend your finite time on, if your desire to speak is not strong enough to overcome the friction of learning how to speak, is it something that needed to be said?

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl came out last week, and people aren’t happy with it, including her fans. I liked what the independent sports outlet (I know) Defector had to say about it:

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot. That’s what art becomes when its primary goal is to make money: unoriginal, boring, palatable.

Good art is inefficient. Good community is inefficient, too.

My book club is constituted primarily of people I had never met—and who had never met each other—prior to this year. We inaugurated the group by reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which is a book about what happens to civil society when we opt for ease and comfort in the privacy of our homes over the friction of participating in democracy. We read that book the same way we’re reading Graeber and Wengrow now, meeting in different locations across Toronto over months, discussing one chunk at a time.

This is inefficient: trying to coordinate the schedules of half a dozen adults to consistently meet is a herculean task, and every meetup is padded with commuting time, chit-chat time, time spent ordering and eating food. We started when the days were short and the air was icy and it would have been so much easier not to commit, so easy to read by myself in the privacy of my own home, perhaps listening to the audiobook on 2x speed, or reading some AI-generated summary. Frictionless.

Authoritarianism promises a frictionless world for the right kind of people, and the adherents of authoritarianism always imagine that they themselves are the right kind of people, that the leopard will never eat their face, or better yet that they themselves are the leopards. The promise of frictionlessness often comes wearing a disguise of efficiency. You don’t have to sit through endless committees and public consultations and town halls to try to convince people of the rightness of your cause, you just bulldoze your way through the commons to build a ghastly megaspa.

I have been on many projects and teams where I have been immensely frustrated by the people I am collaborating with, and wished that I had the power to just tell them to do the thing I want them to do. The friction that the political project of AI promises to remove is, by and large, the same friction that authoritarianism promises to remove: other people. You don’t have to build a relationship with other human beings who are just as complex and contradictory as you and who will probably frustrate you in all sorts of ways, maybe by challenging your preconceptions or expecting you to follow through on your commitments. You will never have to learn to work together, to understand how to compromise, to accept that sometimes you won’t get what you want and that that’s for the best. You can just talk to an AI who will affirm the righteousness of your position.

This promised frictionlessness is not real. Of course it’s not real. Not just because OpenAI will update its engine and take away your AI girlfriend, or because the endless cash burn will catch up to the industry and you’ll be asked to to foot the bill they’ve been hiding from you all along, or because the greedy fuckers taking over our governments will use AI to justify taking away our health care and our social services until there’s nothing left but friction, or even because deep fakes will ruin destroy any lingering semblance we still have of a consensus reality and you and I have for the most part never lived in a world without a consensus reality and cannot conceive of how difficult that actually is.

It’s not real because at the end of the day, no matter how much you try to remove yourself from the inconvenient needs of others, you are still a person. I am still a person. The friction inside our own brains is the one thing you cannot escape from, and in a thousand ways big and small we need other people, and you might as well start practicing how to be needed by them, too.

Does Mark Zuckerberg strike you as a particularly happy or fulfilled person? Does Peter Thiel?

I can read any number of books all by myself (and do!), ruminating only on my own interpretation and never contending with someone who might disagree with me. Or better yet push a button and get a 10-minute AI-generated summary of that book, and push another button and get an AI-generated blog post about the insights of that book that I can throw on LinkedIn and call it thought leadership. Or I can get on a subway for 45-minutes to sit in an overlit fluorescent food court and eat cheap delicious Indian food and laugh with my friends about that time that Kandiaronk totally wrecked some European colonial dummy. Which one is more frictionless? Which one makes me feel more whole?

I choose friction.