AI Made Writing Free. That Was Supposed to Be Good News.
Before AI, writing cost something. You didn't produce a two-thousand word document unless you really had to, because it took hours. That friction was a filter. Now it's gone. A polished, well-structured doc takes twenty minutes and most of that is prompting.
The problem is the cost didn't disappear. It moved. From the writer's time to the reader's brain.
The reader's brain hasn't changed
The reader's brain hasn't upgraded to match the writer's new throughput. Research on working memory puts the number of things you can genuinely hold and process at around four. A 2022 study from the Paris Brain Institute found that hard thinking all day causes a chemical buildup that makes your brain work worse. By 4pm people aren't lazy; they're spent.
So now everyone can produce more, faster, while nobody can consume any more than they could before. That's not a productivity win. That's a tax on attention disguised as efficiency.
The cost of writing didn't disappear. It moved from the writer's time to the reader's brain.
I've started calling this attention debt; the invisible cost you create every time you send something that's longer than it needs to be. Like meeting rooms becoming free after COVID, removing the friction didn't remove the cost. It just made us less aware of it.
Feel it for yourself
There's a simple way to make this concrete. Try the calculator below.
That's a half-hour meeting you didn't schedule. Worth a second look.
That five-minute doc you sent to forty people? You just called a three-hour meeting that nobody agreed to attend.
What you actually do about it
"Claude wrote most of this" is not a quality control strategy. Your name is on it. That means you own the reader's time, not just the words.
Here are three prompts I use before I send anything long. They take thirty seconds and they've stopped me from inflicting at least a dozen unnecessary essays on my team.
Cut it down
Find the real audience
Convert to the right format
This is the same idea behind shared documents not being shared understanding; the document itself is never the whole story. The question isn't "did I write it clearly?" It's "does this need to exist in this form at all?"
The point
AI made writing free. It didn't make reading free. Every document you send is a withdrawal from someone else's finite attention budget, and the fact that it cost you nothing to produce makes it worse, not better.
The discipline now isn't in the writing. It's in the not-sending. Or at least in the editing-before-sending. Use the same tools that made the mess to clean it up.
Ben Stewart is an engineering leader at Skyscanner, writing about software and leadership at benstewart.ai.
Related