A few years ago, watching an AI write three tidy paragraphs felt like the future. Today it hands you three pages on demand, and what you feel is closer to dread.
Count the AI summaries someone sent you this week. Now count the ones you actually read. That gap is the whole story. When generating text cost human effort, text carried weight. Now anyone can produce twenty airtight pages before their coffee cools, which means twenty airtight pages nobody asked for are worth roughly what they cost to make. The scarcity flipped sides: writing became free, reading stayed expensive, and every wall of AI prose sends the bill to the reader.
And the harsh version: your beautifully prompted summary? Nobody read that either. They scrolled it hoping a number would jump out, gave up around paragraph three, and asked you in chat. The wall of text is not a deliverable. It is a queue.
Put the two eras side by side:
The essay era
