Do you ever step back and think about how things were made?  How did someone record that song? What are the efforts and skill that go into painting a mural on a wall? What kinds of thoughts brewed in the head of a novelist before she sat down and typed it out into hundreds of pages of story?

Even something like this little essay.  Chances are you are reading it, skimming over the words, maybe pondering the ideas. You likely come across multiple articles, essays, posts, and other written pieces every single day, but do you sit back and consider the time, effort and skill that went into making them? Or are they just ghosts that appear fully formed, their sources of no concern to you?

I don’t ask this to seek some kind of creator pity.

I ask this to posit a theory: is it possible algorithmically generated content is easier to accept when one rarely considers the usual human effort needed to get that same product?

Everyone has blind spots, after all. I drive on roads and couldn’t tell you how to build one. I ride in passenger jets across the ocean, but have no good concept of what it takes to become a pilot. We all miss some aspect of the work that goes into things we use, see, consume, read, and enjoy.

But if there were less phantom processes making the human things, do you think we’d be more or less eager to accept the algorithmic replacements?