Over the centuries, we’ve done a great job of outsourcing activities that we hate. If you hate it enough or have little enough time, you will pay for someone else to do it. Perhaps with some guilt, but mostly with relief.

However, today’s economy has us outsourcing…our joy? Our complex, whooping, soaring joy? Have we become so horizontal that we can’t even be bothered to feel ecstasy?

Having an LLM come up with ideas prevents us hitting that startling moment of excitement when we find a connection between two previously unconnected morsels hidden deep in our memory. Prompting it to write a first draft stops us downloading feelings we didn’t realise we had, in language never used in this exact way before in human history. Asking it to edit and refine lets a soulless computer iron out all the glorious wrinkles that we should be admiring in ourselves – our writing, the mirror that lets us see how we shine so bright.

Joy! We are relegating joy to the category of undesirable tasks. And not only that; a pure joy that we make ourselves, for free. Not a guilty pleasure, not a habit that feeds capitalism and causes children to live in a polluted world. We’re talking about a joy that has fuelled humanity for thousands of years, through hardship and fear.

The joy of creating was one of the only things we had left for ourselves, because it comes from our minds. Generative AI is the final commodification. If you outsource your joy, they have you. Paying a subscription for a semblance of the creativity that you’ve been happily producing at an incomparably high quality since you were a child.

Please, I beg you, don’t pay a fee for joy to be removed from you to a hygienic distance. Without our creativity, our thinking and our joy, we are the drones the men who run this world desire.

Paper beats rock. Joy beats control.