This might be a hot take.

But my gut tells me that I'll be on the right side of history.

Here goes:

AI didn’t break anything. It just makes one simple truth harder to ignore.

Attention matters more than skill.

Some artists have been acting like creation is the entire point. Art, for art’s sake. But as I've written before, while "alluring," it often falls short of reality. Before ChatGPT, that story was easier to believe when scarcity was part of the creative process when gatekeepers held the keys, when access was limited. Even digital had its own gatekeeping. The tools themselves.

Now, anyone can make anything, anytime, anywhere, in a hyper-connected world. And the issue isn’t that the art got worse. It didn’t. It’s that the mask finally came off. We can all see the game for what it really is. And realize it’s always been that way. The illusion broke. And we all collectively can’t unsee it. Attention matters more than skill. It always has.

Even the most celebrated artists in history weren’t above chasing attention. Da Vinci positioned himself for recognition and patronage. Van Gogh’s work didn’t gain traction until after his death—and that only happened because his sister-in-law championed it. The Mona Lisa wasn’t always iconic. It became the world's most famous painting after being stolen in 1911 (possibly by Picasso), and the media turned it into a global story.

Attention has always mattered.

AI agents and LLMs all make that truth harder to avoid. The myth of pure creation is coming undone. We can no longer pretend that creation happens in isolation or that it speaks for itself. It never did. Now we have to reckon with that.

Some people weren’t being dishonest. They just didn’t want to admit that attention mattered more than they were comfortable with. Others were fully lying to themselves, unwilling to accept that in the real world, attention often outweighs skill.

Even in the social media era, where that’s been so painfully and unequivocally obvious for so, so long, many still didn’t want to see it. Maybe AI helps force the conversation.

Because when anyone can make anything, and everyone’s chasing attention, maybe we finally stop pretending. Maybe we stop worrying about whose idea it was, or who did it first, or whether something “belongs” to someone at all.

And now, thanks to NFT technology, we can cryptographically track authorship and provenance. So maybe that frees us up from some of the concerns with ownership and credit. Maybe we stop clinging so tightly to originality and just get back to making things together. Not to prove anything, but because we understand that the real value in art is shaped by attention, not skill.