Is AI Actually Making Us Richer or Just Broke?

The technical threshold for creation is collapsing. Coding, high-end visual design, and marketing copy are now just a prompt away, effectively erasing the traditional entry barriers across the industry. We are witnessing a massive deflation in the cost of execution.

But here is the kicker: while the barrier to doing things is lower, the barrier to actually making money feels higher than ever.

It feels like we’ve entered an era of hyper-competition. Because everyone can now produce "good enough" content or software with a single click, the market is getting flooded. When everyone has the same tools, the value of the output tends to plummet toward zero. To actually stand out and capture profit, you can't just be a user of AI; you have to be a master of it.

To make it even more frustrating, the overhead is skyrocketing. Between monthly subscriptions for LLMs, API costs, and the massive compute power needed to run sophisticated workflows, staying competitive is becoming incredibly expensive. We are essentially trading human labor costs for massive cloud computing bills.

Are we actually becoming more efficient, or are we just running faster on a much more expensive treadmill?