Generative AI and the Fading Out Of Creative Struggle

Slaves to Speed and Generative AI Tools 

We are being sold speed. In our consumerist society by and large, and specifically
across the landscape of generative AI tools, the promise is identical and insistent: compress months of work into minutes, turn hours into seconds, accelerate everything.

Marketing for AI writing assistants, music generators, and image creators trumpet the same gospel of velocity—10x productivity, instant outputs, frictionless creation. Adobe promises to “create amazing work faster than ever.” Synthesia offers to “create videos at the speed of thought.” In the realm of music production, AI tools pledge to help you “produce professional tracks in minutes, not months.”

The underlying assumption is so pervasive it barely registers as an assumption at all: that faster is better, that what takes time could and should be instantaneous, that the value of creative work lies in its output rather than its process. The struggle to create, once considered integral to the work itself, has been «rebranded» as an inefficiency to be eliminated, a bottleneck to be levelled away.

What has Suno founder Michael Shulman said about the creative process?
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice… I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.” (interview on the 20VC podcast)

But what if this entire premise is backwards? What if, in certain domains of human endeavor, the struggle is not ancillary to the work but constitutive of it? What if the time spent wrestling with a creative problem is not time wasted but time transmuted into something that speed can never arrive at?

I want to examine these questions through the lens of Paul Virilio’s concept of dromology, the study of speed, and through the concrete examples of composers and songwriters whose struggles produced  works of genius that might never have existed had they been created quickly.

Virilio’s Dromology: Under the Hood of the Cult of Speed

French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio spent much of his career studying what he called dromology—from the Greek dromos, meaning racecourse—the logic and impact of speed in contemporary society. For Virilio, speed is not merely a neutral attribute that makes things happen faster; rather, speed fundamentally transforms the nature of whatever it touches. A message delivered in seconds is not simply a faster version of a message delivered in days—it is a different kind of message entirely, with different social implications and different effects on human consciousness.

Virilio warned that modern civilization had become dromocratic, a society organized around speed as its primary value and guiding principle. In such a society, temporal compression erodes what he saw as essential human capacities: the value of patience, the depth that comes from reflection, the wisdom that emerges only through sustained attention over time. Speed becomes totalizing, colonizing every domain of life, until the question “Could this be faster?” becomes the only question we know how to ask.

Crucially, Virilio argued that every technology contains within it its own specific accident. The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. The invention of the train was the invention of the derailment. The accident is not an unfortunate side effect; it is intrinsic to the technology itself, a latent potential that is present from the moment of invention.

The accident of speed, for Virilio, is the progressive virtualization and desertification of lived, embodied experience—the replacement of presence with simulation, depth with surface, being with representation. What, then, might be the accident inherent in AI-accelerated creativity? What shipwreck awaits when we board the vessel of instant artistic production with no life-jackets or lifeboats?

The Paradox: Struggle as Generative Force

There are plenty of stories about hit-songs that came to the writer «in a dream» or that came together in «no time». The myth of Mozart in essence is of the genius for whom creation is an easy game. There’s no question that genius works of art exist that were the results of a speedy birth. However, the artists didn’t arrive at their creative state without any kind of struggle. Furthermore, the struggle, hitting the wall, getting lost in dead ends etc., I’d argue enhances the work and empowers «the genius».

Consider Johannes Brahms and his First Symphony, a work that took approximately 21 years to complete. Brahms began sketching the symphony in his early twenties but was paralyzed by the monumental shadow of Beethoven. The pressure was not merely psychological; it was almost ontological. How does one write a symphony after Beethoven has seemingly exhausted the form’s possibilities?

Brahms’s struggle was so profound, his self-doubt so paralyzing, that he destroyed numerous early versions of the work. The symphony that finally emerged was shaped as much by what Brahms eliminated as by what he kept, refined through decades of revision, rejection, and renewal.

Pressure, just as in geology, can create diamonds. When Brahms’s First Symphony finally premiered in 1876, conductor Hans von Bülow called it “Beethoven’s Tenth,” both a compliment and a vindication. Brahms had not merely written a good symphony; he had proven that the symphonic form could be renewed, that it was possible to honor tradition while transcending it.

Once he completed his First Symphony, Brahms wrote his next three symphonies in relatively rapid succession. It was as if the twenty-one-year struggle had forged not just a single work but a capacity—a set of creative muscles built through sustained resistance. The terror and the pressure created conditions not merely for one symphony but for a flowering of symphonic achievement. The struggle, in other words, was not incidental to the genius; it was the forge in which this genius was tempered.

Or consider Leonard Cohen, whose relationship with his craft was fundamentally one of wrestling. When asked where good songs come from, Cohen replied with characteristic honesty: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition.” This acknowledgment of mystery is crucial. Cohen understood that the creative process could not be rationalized, systematized, or accelerated without fundamentally altering its nature.

Cohen’s description of his process reveals a profound commitment to seeing ideas through their full gestation: “Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it… The cutting of a gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.” This is the opposite of rapid iteration. It is slow cultivation, patient attention, the willingness to labor over what may ultimately be discarded. It is an embrace of necessary inefficiency.

Perhaps no song better illustrates the relationship between struggle and transcendence than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The song that has become a spiritual anthem, covered by hundreds of artists and performed at countless moments of collective emotion, nearly killed its creator.

Cohen wrote eighty verses for “Hallelujah” before discarding all but four. Eighty. Verses. He described being “on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’” This was not merely perfectionism; it was a kind of creative agony, a physical wrestling with the material. The image is almost biblical; Jacob wrestling the angel through the night, refusing to let go until he receives a blessing.

Both Brahms and Cohen understood something that the cult of speed cannot accommodate: that certain kinds of excellence emerge only through prolonged engagement with difficulty, that there are depths accessible only to those willing to remain in the struggle long enough to be transformed by it.

Speed Transforms Nature

Virilio’s central insight—that speed fundamentally alters the nature of what it accelerates—applies with particular force to creative work. When songwriting is compressed from ten years to ten minutes, we have not simply made the same process more efficient. We have created an entirely different kind of activity.

There is a difference between generation and gestation. Generation is the production of output; gestation is the slow development of something alive. An AI can generate a song in seconds, but it cannot gestate one over decades. It cannot experience the revision of understanding that transforms Cohen’s theology and thereby transforms his song. It cannot feel the terror that paralyzed Brahms or the liberation that followed.

The outputs may be superficially similar, but they are categorically different in their relationship to time, consciousness, and human transformation. Speed has not merely accelerated the process; it has fundamentally changed what the process is and what it produces.

The Erosion of Creative Consciousness

Virilio was deeply concerned with what he called the virtualization and desertification of lived, embodied experience. In the context of creative work, this manifests as the progressive removal of the creator from the creative act itself.

When Cohen bangs his head on the carpet in frustration, when Brahms destroys yet another draft, when a songwriter spends months on verses that will ultimately be discarded—this is not merely labor toward a product. It is a form of consciousness in action, a way of being attentive to something other than oneself. The struggle itself is a kind of discipline, training attention, cultivating patience, developing what we might call creative wisdom.

Generative AI removes the creator from this disciplinary process. The user inputs a prompt and receives a result. The gap between intention and execution collapses to near-zero. There is no opportunity for the unexpected insight that arises only in the middle of struggle, no chance encounter with an idea that changes the direction of the work, no moment when the work itself teaches the creator something they did not know they needed to learn.

Speed, in this context, is a form of alienation—alienation from one’s own creative process, from the material being shaped, from the transformation that occurs when one wrestles with difficulty over time. The creator becomes a prompter, a consumer and producer of outputs, rather than someone who is changed by the act of making.

The Accident of Instant Creation

If every technology contains its own accident, what is the accident of AI-accelerated creativity? It is not merely bad art or derivative work, though these may be symptoms. The deeper accident is the loss of the struggling self that discovers itself through making.

When Brahms finally completed his First Symphony, he had become someone capable of writing symphonies. The twenty-one years had not just produced a work; they had produced a symphonist. When Cohen emerged from his decades-long wrestlings with “Hallelujah,” he had become someone whose consciousness had been shaped by the very struggle to articulate spiritual truth.

The accident of instant creation is that it bypasses this transformation entirely. It produces outputs without producing creators. It gives us songs without giving us songwriters in the deepest sense—people whose very selves have been remixed by the discipline of sweating over to difficult work over time.

In Virilio’s terms, this is the desertification of creative consciousness itself. The landscape of struggle, difficult, often painful, but rich with the possibility of transformation, is replaced by the smooth, frictionless surface of instant generation. We gain speed; we lose depth. We gain outputs; we lose the self-that-creates.

Struggle/Slowness vs. Speed

Hey man, slow down, slow down
Idiot, slow down, slow down. («The Tourist» – Radiohead)

To understand what is lost in acceleration, we must identify what struggle uniquely provides:

• Time for consciousness to evolve. Brahm’s 21 year composition of his symphony was not 21 years of continuous work on the composition; it was 21 years of developing a new language, and evolving am existing discipline, and emerge on the other end as a new being.
• The discipline of ruthless editing. Cohen’s reduction of eighty verses to four was not merely selection but a kind of spiritual discipline, a practice of letting go. This discipline («kill your darlings») is one of the hardest-won skills in any creative domain. It cannot be learned except through the painful process of having to choose.
• The pressure cooker of genius. Brahms’s terror under the shadow of Beethoven was not pleasant, but it was generative. The pressure of expectation, the fear of inadequacy, the impossibility of the task—these created the conditions for breakthrough. Comfort and speed eliminate pressure, and with it, the peculiar excellence that emerges only under duress.
• Fidelity to mystery. Cohen’s acknowledgment that creativity is “a mysterious condition” reflects a humility before the unknowable aspects of the creative process. Struggle keeps us in sustained contact with this mystery. Speed eliminates mystery by making creation comprehensible, controllable, optimizable.
• Self-knowledge through resistance. When we struggle with difficult work, we discover our own limits, biases, and capacities. We learn what we actually think by the laborious process of trying to articulate it.
• The work as its own reward. Cohen articulated this beautifully: “Art is self-renewal… The work itself is the reward. If you make the process more important than the outcome then your art never stops.” When creation is instantaneous, there is no process to find rewarding. There is only the outcome, and the perpetual dissatisfaction that comes from outcome-focused consciousness.

The Virtue of Slowness

The distinction between Gen-AI as tool and Gen-AI as replacement is crucial. Used thoughtfully, AI might help with technical execution, suggest possibilities, overcome blocks. But when it is marketed and adopted as a way to eliminate the struggle itself, to bypass the years that Brahms needed, the decades that Cohen required, it becomes something else: not an augmentation of creativity but its replacement with something faster and shallower.

Virilio provocatively suggested the concept of voluntary technological regression, not as a practical program but as a thought experiment to help us recognize how thoroughly we have submitted to the logic of acceleration. What would it mean to choose slowness, to deliberately embrace difficulty, to structure our creative practices around time rather than against it?

In an age of instant generation, taking ten years to write a song becomes a radical act. Destroying drafts, starting over, banging your head on the floor in frustration—these are forms of resistance to the dromocratic imperative. They assert that some things cannot and should not be accelerated, that depth is achieved only through duration, that certain truths reveal themselves only to those willing to wait.

A line from another Cohen song, “Anthem” describes this (im)perfectly: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The cracks; the imperfections, the struggles, the places where we fail and have to begin again are not obstacles to illumination. They are its preconditions. And cracks only form under pressure,… over time.

The accident of instant creation is that it produces surfaces too smooth for light to enter. We gain speed; we lose the cracks. We gain productivity; we lose the transformation that comes from struggling with work that resists us. We gain outputs; we lose the self-that-emerges-through-making.

The choice before us is not whether to use generative AI—that decision has already been made by market forces and technological momentum. The choice is whether we will preserve and protect spaces for slower forms of making, whether we will continue to value work that takes time, whether we will resist the totalizing logic of acceleration in domains where speed fundamentally changes what is possible.

Against the acceleration, we might insist on the right to struggle. Not because struggle is harmonic, but because it is the medium through which deeper kinds of human excellence emerge. Not because all struggle is productive, but because the systematic elimination of difficulty represents an impoverishment of the creative consciousness itself.

Speed is not always wrong, but there are depths accessible only to those willing to descend slowly, to remain in the difficulty, to be changed by the work of making. In the end, the question is theological: What do we worship? Speed and productivity, outputs and efficiency? Or something slower, deeper, more mysterious, the transformation of the self through prolonged engagement with work that resists easy completion?

The cult of speed is a road to accidents that provoke self-annihilation. If we exclude arguably the most human parts of creation, the creator herself becomes a simulacrum of an artist and a tool for eliminating human expression.

Is it all doom and gloom? I don’t know, I worry about our general acceptance of the cult of speed and how tech-execs have culture in a stranglehold. And, the one thing that lightens the mood is every time I see a new band/artist «Kick out the jams…!!»