New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman asks the question that haunts every creative in the age of algorithmic assistance: Why even try if A.I. can do it for you?
His essay “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”unpacks a cultural crossroads: we can be passive passengers on an automated flight to mediocrity, or we can grab the yoke, face the headwinds, and fly the damn plane ourselves. The latter takes effort and agency. The former? Just surrender, recline your seat, and trust the software.
Rothman begins with a deceptively simple truth: human excellence is born through repetition and variation. Take a piano sonata. Play it every day and it evolves—new inflections emerge, tempo shifts, harmonies stretch and bend. The music becomes yours not because it’s perfect, but because it’s lived. This principle holds across any discipline: cooking, lifting, writing, woodworking, improv jazz. The point isn’t to chase perfection, but to expand what engineers call your “design space”—the evolving terrain of mastery passed from one generation to the next. It’s how we adapt, create, and flourish. Variation, not polish, is the currency of human survival.
A.I. disrupts that process. Not through catastrophe, but convenience. It lifts the burden of repetition, which sounds like mercy, but may be slow annihilation. Why wrestle with phrasing when a chatbot can generate ten variations in a second? Why compose from scratch when you can scroll through synthetic riffs until one sounds “good enough”? At some point, you’re not a creator—you’re a casting agent, auditioning content for a machine-written reality show.
This is the creep of A.I.—not Terminator-style annihilation, but frictionless delegation.
Repetition gets replaced by selection. Cognitive strain is erased. The design space—the sacred ground of human flourishing—gets paved over with one-size-fits-all templates. And we love it, because it’s easy.
Take car shopping. Do I really want to endure a gauntlet of slick-haired salesmen and endless test drives? Or would I rather ask ChatGPT to confirm what I already believe—that the 2025 Honda Accord Hybrid Touring is the best sedan under 40K, and that metallic eggshell is obviously the right color for my soulful-but-sensible lifestyle?
A.I. doesn’t challenge me. It affirms me, reflects me, flatters me. That’s the trap.
But here’s where I resist: I’m 63, and I still train like a lunatic in my garage with kettlebells five days a week. No algorithm writes my workouts. I improvise like a jazz drummer on creatine—Workout A (heavy), Workout B (medium), Workout C (light). It’s messy, adaptive, and real. I rely on sweat, not suggestions. Pain is the feedback loop. Soreness is the algorithm.
Same goes for piano. Every day, I sit and play. Some pieces have taken a decade to shape. A.I. can’t help here—not meaningfully. Because writing music isn’t about what works. It’s about what moves. And that takes time. Revision. Tension. Discomfort.
That said, I’ve made peace with the fact that A.I. is to writing what steroids are to a bodybuilder. I like to think I’ve got a decent handle on rhetoric—my tone, my voice, my structure, my knack for crafting an argument. But let’s not kid ourselves: I’ve run my prose against ChatGPT, and in more than a few rounds, it’s left me eating dust. Without A.I., I’m a natural bodybuilder—posing clean, proud, and underwhelming. With A.I., I’m a chemically enhanced colossus, veins bulging with metaphor and syntax so tight it could cut glass. In the literary arena, if the choice is between my authentic, mortal self and the algorithmic beast? Hand me the syringe. I’ll flex with the machine.
Still, I know the difference. And knowing the difference is everything.
Cinemorphosis 
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