Back in 2012, Robin Sloan released a “tap essay” called Fish—a meditation on what it means to like and love something on the internet. It’s a free app to download for Mac or iOS. I recommend you do so. It’s also something I revisit from time to time, simply because its message—that to love is to return—is, largely, timeless.

But in this era of AI content, I want to propose a corollary for Fish — choosing to manually create and consume has become a radical act of love. Taking the time to do intellectual labor the newly-hard way carries a meaning all its own. Much akin to a like on social platforms, generating with AI is increasingly cheap. I can go to Claude, or Gemini, or ChatGPT, (or, or, or) and feed it a bunch of information, and get at least a reasonable artifact in return.