Working harder was always correlated with a better chance of success. Maybe not perfectly, and maybe not fairly, but the signal was there.
You could look at a hefty book, a dense PowerPoint, a polished piece of software, and you could feel the blood and sweat that went into it. And not just the thing itself, but the years of accumulated knowledge required to even get to that level. The output carried proof of the effort.
The world was never fair. Nepotism, inherited advantage, luck. All real. But there was still a sense that effort showed up in the work itself.
"Work smarter, not harder" has long been the mantra. But shortcuts were mostly a mirage. Generally speaking, the people who put in the hours, stacked up the reps, earned the expertise the slow way increased their chances of success. Smartness helped, sure. But it rarely replaced the grind.
AI might be turning that on its head. Someone can now generate a respectable first draft of almost anything by typing a prompt and waiting a couple of minutes. A document that used to take weeks. A slide deck that used to take days. Code that used to take months. The shortcut is no longer a mirage. It works. And it keeps getting better.
I keep thinking about what this does to creativity. There's a part of creating something where the creator takes pride in sharing it with the world. You made this thing, and you want people to see it, react to it, build on it. That impulse is wired into us. We're social creatures. We create for ourselves, but at some point, we want to share what we've made.
So what happens when the default assumption shifts to skepticism? When someone reads your essay or looks at your app and their first thought is "AI probably made this"? Even if you wrote every word, drew every wireframe, debugged every function yourself. Does that skepticism put a damper on wanting to create things for the world? I think it might. Not because people stop being creative, but because the feedback loop that rewards sharing gets weaker. The connection between creator and audience gets noisier.
I think about this with Cooperation Cube, a tabletop game I designed and built from scratch back in 2017. I sketched the rules on a flight from Narita to Dulles, spent months drilling holes through solid wooden blocks in the workshop, cut and painted dozens of sticks, and playtested it at our kitchen table. The game mechanics, the physical construction, the card design, all of it was mine. I love the game itself. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't also love the fact that I made this weird, original thing entirely on my own.
If I had made the same game today, in 2026, I don't think anyone would believe that. They'd look at the polished card layouts, the balanced scoring system, the clever rotation mechanic, and assume a large language model designed it. That I typed a prompt and an AI spit out the rules. The physical cube might get a pass, but even that feels uncertain. And the strange thing is, I wouldn't be able to prove them wrong. There's no certificate of authenticity for creative work. There's just your word, and your word weighs less than it used to.
You can still create for yourself. Nobody can take that away. But humans don't just create in isolation. They create to connect. And if the world stops believing the connection is real, I wonder what we lose.