Swiping my thumb across the red ‘End Call’ icon was a physiological reflex I hadn’t yet authorized, a twitch born of sheer cognitive overload. Marcus was mid-sentence, likely about to pivot into another speech about ‘agile synergy’ or some other phrase that sounds like a salad dressing, when my sweaty palm betrayed my professional standing. Now I was staring at a black screen, reflecting my own panicked face, while 16 floors below, the city hummed along as if I hadn’t just accidentally committed career suicide. I didn’t call him back. Not yet. Instead, I turned my attention to Sarah, our lead designer, who was currently drowning in a sea of 86 neon-blue variations of a cereal box label.
Sarah has been at that desk for 6 hours. On her timesheet, it will look like a productive day of ‘creative exploration,’ but as a packaging frustration analyst, I see the truth. I see the 266 discarded iterations littering her scratch disk. I see the invisible weight of the 46 browser tabs she’s afraid to close. We’ve been told that generation is cheap, that the cost of an image is essentially zero because the AI doesn’t charge by the hour. But Sarah does. Marcus does.
We are currently obsessed with the magic of the ‘Generate’ button. It feels like a superpower to conjure 56 different