People went from running as transportation to running for all sorts of other reasons. There’s physical and mental health, personal development, and community, amongst so many other reasons. 

In other words, we don’t need to run to get someplace; we found new ways to need running.

It’s worth considering this when you think about artificial intelligence’s implications on creative work. Certainly, a LLM will be able to generate text and imagery faster than you—and any other person!—can. 

The same way we pay for paint nights, or choose to journal, sooner or later we’ll come to appreciate that the tangible work itself wasn’t the point. We don’t think to write, we write to think. 

Just getting to actually participate in the creative process is enough reason to do it. Outsourcing to an LLM defeats the purpose. Coincidentally enough those same reasons I mentioned for running—physical and mental health, personal development, and community—still apply to almost all forms of creative work.

Clever businesses will do for creativity what Nike did for running.

P.S., It’s also worth remembering, not everybody chooses to run.