Creativity Doesn't Have to Hurt

There’s a stubborn idea that real creativity comes from struggle, isolation and pain. We’ve been sold the myth of the “suffering genius,” a romantic picture of Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo or even Steve Jobs toiling in agony until something brilliant comes out. The story says great art or invention has to be painful, slow and laborious to count. It’s supposed to be solitary, too. The fear of plagiarism runs the same program from the other side: it enforces the lone-genius myth, which serves the companies that own creative work more than the people doing it.

What if creativity can come from joy, curiosity and collaboration instead? We’ve made suffering the only legitimate route to work of value, and that shuts out a lot of people, especially neurodivergent creators who use AI or other technology to streamline their work. They’re made to feel their creations are “less than” because they didn’t come from the “right” kind of hard work.

Who has the time to suffer

Toil fetishism attaches to time as well as to emotional suffering: the longer something takes to make, the more it’s assumed to be worth. That favors people with the time and money to spend months or years on a single project. Historically, creative fields belonged to the financially privileged, from the patrons of Renaissance Europe to the well-off members of 19th-century literary salons.

Working-class and marginalized creators are juggling jobs, caregiving and everything else, and have less time to give. Their work gets taken less seriously simply because they can’t put months or years into it.

When we look at a painting or listen to a new song, we tend to assume its value lies partly in the labor we can’t see: the hours, the emotional struggle, the suffering behind it. That invisible labor gets treated as the essence of real creativity, and work that came quickly or without visible struggle gets written off.

Creators who use tools or methods that cut the time and effort involved, whether AI, digital platforms or collaboration, are seen as taking shortcuts, and their work is ranked lower even when it’s original and good. For neurodivergent creators and those from marginalized backgrounds, that bias is one more barrier to recognition. Why should a tool that makes creation easier or faster disqualify the work from being taken seriously?

What the State Fair fight was about

In 2022, Jason Allen’s Théâtre D’opéra Spatial took first place in the digital arts and digitally manipulated photography category at the Colorado State Fair. He’d generated the image with Midjourney, which turns text prompts into pictures, then retouched it in Photoshop and enlarged it with another AI tool. Thousands of comments online called the win unfair.1 Critics said AI art broke the rules and went against the methods digital artists use. Allen, who says he told the judges he’d used Midjourney, answered in the same currency. “It took a long time,” he told a local station. “I put over 80+ hours into this project.” He said he’d generated more than 900 images while fine-tuning his prompt.2

Both sides were arguing about effort, and the U.S. Copyright Office decided a different question. Allen applied to register the image and told the office he’d entered “numerous revisions and text prompts at least 624 times.” In September 2023 its Review Board refused to register the work unless he excluded what Midjourney had generated, because his prompts didn’t control what the system produced. Under the office’s guidance, the “traditional elements of authorship” in such an image are “determined and executed by the technology.”3 The Board took the 624 prompts as given; what it asked was whether Allen controlled the result.

Another objection had nothing to do with effort. In January 2023, three artists, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, sued Midjourney and two other companies, alleging that their image models were trained on millions of copyrighted works without the artists’ permission.4 That complaint is about whose work the tool was built from, without their permission, and an argument against toil worship doesn’t touch it.

Effort is sometimes a fair proxy, too. Where a judge can’t see skill directly, visible hours of practice are evidence of it. That proxy breaks when a tool changes what an hour buys, and it breaks hardest on the creators who had the fewest hours to spend.

Toil keeps creators out

Toil and time work as gatekeeping. Critics, curators and institutions tend to favor work that shows traditional, labor-intensive processes, and dismiss work made quickly or by other means, such as digital art or AI-generated music, as inauthentic or inferior. The resulting hierarchy pushes out anyone who can’t or won’t meet those expectations, for lack of time, access or desire.

The worst effect may be that creators and workers absorb these expectations. They start to doubt their own legitimacy if a piece didn’t take long enough or wasn’t hard enough to make. They stick to traditional, labor-intensive processes even when faster or more inventive methods are available, and the habit stifles the creativity the processes were supposed to prove.

For marginalized creators the damage is worse. Neurodivergent creators who rely on tools or time-saving methods to manage their creative flow often feel their work isn’t valid because it didn’t come out of suffering.

The same goes for working-class creators who don’t have years to spend perfecting a single piece. Once they take on these expectations, they limit their own work and feel shut out of the spaces where they should be thriving.

Valuing what the work does

Getting rid of toil fetishism means dropping the idea that creativity has to come from prolonged labor and suffering and judging the work itself: what’s new in it, what it means, what it does. If traditional, AI-assisted and fast methods all count, more people and more perspectives get in.

The fair’s own fix points somewhere useful. For 2023 it kept AI work eligible in the digital art category and required every digital entry to declare its medium and whether it was AI-assisted.5 A judge who knows the process can still judge the work. The question to put to any prize, grant or hiring panel is which of the two its rubric actually scores: what the entrant chose and made, or how long it took.