The Invisibles and the Deliverables

May, 2026

How does the artist create the right side of the horse? We tend to think that the magic is somehow in the tools. If I owned that pencil, if I used the same software, if I bought that camera, I could produce the same work, the same output.

It's not true, of course. I have plenty of left-sides-of-horses to prove it. In between the pencil and the horse is a black box full of training and practice, talent and effort.

But...

Generative AI does let me type a few words and generate a horse. Or an essay, or a song, or a web application. No more black box! Direct from desire to output without any of the tedious failure or effort.

An explosion of creation has resulted, much of it terrible, some decent. But a piece of art, a design, a story, a UI...they have always been the final product of a whole lot of thinking, decision-making, curation, and iteration. Work that is invisible to anyone who doesn't do it themselves.

What happens when you produce deliverables without those invisible inputs? It might be fine, at least at first glance. It can certainly look or sound impressive, because we all know how hard it used to be to produce such things.

But instant output hasn't had a lot of thought applied. The machines are remixing human work, but they are not thinking or bringing their perspective to it. They can't.

So we're seeing products that look right, but are wrong in subtle ways. Not just "that person has 11 fingers," but interfaces that are subtly broken, code that is inefficient or redundant, writing with all the flavour of a gym bro's chicken breast.

Yes, of course it is possible to co-work with generated output and craft something better. That's happening already. But that takes time, effort, and individual perspective. If we don't build in time for it, time marinating in someone's mind, we're losing much more than we can ever regain through topping token leaderboards.

When outputs are so fast, we can get too far down the road too quickly, landing on a solution without considering other options. Read Christopher Noessel's article for more on that. Speed matters. It really does.

But there's no victory in being the first person to arrive at the wrong location. Use the tools to save you time and effort, but don't skip the hard work that makes it yours.

This article first appeared in the May 7th, 2026 edition of the More Human newsletter.

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