Over years of being a doomscroller, we have gone from seeing each other's cups of coffee to only hearing from our friends when they comment or like our posts.

Now I hardly see posts from people I actually know at all.

So it makes sense that people feel that if they don't have their stuff on Instagram, they in effect do not exist. For artists and creative producers like myself, that pressure is real. What started as a peephole into other people's studio lives has become endless scrolling through artist reels engineered to stop the scroll.

Playing to the algorithm followed: the split-second window in which to deploy a lethal dose of dopamine. Achieving realism is like a bolt of lightning from the gods. Wow. And inevitably, that has ended up in actual physical galleries.

Kyle Chayka, in his book Filterworld, puts his finger on it:

"frictionlessness is always the algorithm's ideal, because as soon as you slow down, you might just reconsider what you are clicking on."

Friction allows people to think about their actions. The algorithm has prioritised the immediate over the meaningful. We have traded the grit of the studio for the gloss of the feed.

And now for something completely different: AI. The instantly recognisable, photo-realistic charcoal drawing, achieved in seconds. The gloss begins to tarnish.

It appears that AI is having the effect of making real, gritty, handmade art more valuable. The new luxury is made by hand. Collectors are turning away from AI perfection in favour of visible humanity, the backstory, the process, the evidence of a person. That should give us all hope.

Seth Godin said: you can be perfect or you can make art.

That is not to dismiss photorealistic art. The best of it will always rise above the two-second dopamine rush and leave a lasting impression. But generative AI is frictionless. It is excellent at interpolation, averaging out what things look like, and poor at expressing what things mean without resorting to cliché. If AI is great at playing chess, do we want to watch two AIs playing chess together? Do we want art that is devoid of human connection?