COSTLESS SACRIFICE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

An essay is only valuable as it costs the writer something. That cost could be the years of experience that seasoned the piece that took hours to write, or it may be in the hours, weeks, or months of research and writing and editing and rewriting until the piece is good enough. A machine writing the same essay, word for word, wouldn't have paid the same price. Humans can read and feel the costlessness of it, even as the prose improves. We demand a cost.