ai and the treadmill test

# Before You Generate That AI Video, Get on the Treadmill

What if every AI prompt came with a calorie count?

You type:

> “Generate a cinematic video of a dog twerking on the moon.”

The machine responds:

> Energy cost: 10 miles. Please step onto the treadmill to continue.

Are you still pressing “generate”?

That question came to me while creating *The Tubes*, an AI-generated dystopian concept where poor people survive inside glass tubes while the rich watch from the outside.

Yes, the irony is intentional.

I used AI—one of the most resource-hungry technologies of our time—to imagine a future where human beings themselves have become the resource.

And honestly, that future may not be as distant as it looks.

## AI Feels Free Because We Don’t See the Meter

Generative AI feels almost weightless.

You type a sentence. A few seconds later, you have an image, song, website, essay, or video. There is no smoke coming from your laptop. No generator roaring in your living room. No electric meter spinning beside the prompt box.

The cost is hidden behind a clean interface and a blinking cursor.

But every generation requires computation. That computation requires powerful hardware, electricity, cooling systems, data centers, land, water, and human labor.

We see the result.

We rarely see what it took to produce it.

That separation changes how we behave. When something appears to cost nothing, we stop asking whether it is worth making.

We generate ten versions instead of one. We regenerate because a hand looks weird. We make disposable videos for a joke, watch them once, and immediately scroll to the next one.

The internet already trained us to treat content as infinite.

AI is teaching us to treat creation as infinite too.

But creation has never been free. We have simply moved the cost somewhere—and onto someone—we cannot see.

## The Treadmill Test

Imagine if generating an AI video required you to produce the energy yourself.

A short clip costs one mile.

A realistic commercial costs five.

A high-definition video of a dog twerking costs ten.

Suddenly, prompting becomes a decision.

You would plan before generating. You would think through the concept. You might write a better prompt the first time. You would probably ask yourself a question that rarely enters the process now:

Is this worth the energy?

The treadmill is obviously an exaggeration, but it makes the invisible visible. It reconnects consumption with consequence.

Maybe you would still run ten miles for that twerking dog. If so, I respect the commitment.

But you would understand what you were spending.

## Who Runs While Everyone Else Watches?

That is where *The Tubes* becomes more than a visual experiment.

In the world of the video, the poor live inside transparent tubes while the wealthy observe from a safe distance. Their survival is contained, measured, and displayed. The suffering is visible, but it has been turned into entertainment.

That is what makes the idea unsettling.

The rich are not unaware of what is happening. They are watching.

Our current AI economy raises a similar question: as these systems become more powerful, who receives the convenience—and who absorbs the cost?

Who gets the finished video?

Who maintains the infrastructure?

Who supplies the energy, water, minerals, land, data, and labor behind it?

Who gets to create freely, and who eventually gets told to start running?

Technology does not automatically distribute its benefits fairly. Without deliberate choices, it often gives the most powerful people even more leverage while pushing the physical, economic, and environmental costs onto communities with the least power to refuse them.

The dystopia is not that machines become evil.

It is that the system works exactly as designed—and some people are treated as more valuable outside the tubes than others.

## This Is Not an Argument Against AI

I use AI. I build with it. I believe it can expand what an individual creator can imagine and produce.

The answer is not to stop creating.

The answer is to stop pretending creation is frictionless.

We should know more about the resources our tools consume. AI companies should make efficiency a visible feature, not just a behind-the-scenes engineering goal. Creators should become more intentional about what we generate, how many times we generate it, and whether the output deserves the resources it consumes.

Perhaps future AI platforms will show an energy estimate beside every generation. Maybe users will receive monthly compute budgets. Maybe the most efficient models—not only the biggest ones—will become the most desirable.

Or perhaps every video generator should simply come with a treadmill.

## So, Is the Twerking Dog Worth Ten Miles?

AI has given us the power to create almost anything we can describe.

That is incredible.

It is also dangerous—not because every silly video is a moral failure, but because limitless creation can make us forget that we still live on a planet with limits.

*The Tubes* imagines a society where the powerful enjoy the spectacle while everyone else becomes part of the machinery that sustains it.

The question is not whether that exact future will happen.

The question is whether we are already building systems that follow the same logic.

So, before you press “generate” again, imagine the treadmill starting beneath your feet.

Then ask yourself: