AI Didn’t Replace Genius. It Disrupted the Power Imbalance.

Hear me out. Whenever I admit that I use AI, there’s an unspoken assumption lurking underneath the conversation: that I’ve cheated somehow. That real artists sit alone before a blank page until inspiration descends from a gold-trimmed cloud, accompanied by cherubs breathing life into the tortured, struggling artist. In this scenario, the artist is, more often than not, a man. I’m thinking of William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, Thomas Carlyle and George Orwell just to name a few. Men whose genius may indeed have been real, but whose ability to devote themselves almost entirely to their work rested on an invisible infrastructure of women who typed, edited, organised, cooked, managed households, raised children and protected their uninterrupted precious time. The idea of the male genius is therefore only half true. The talent existed, yes. So did the work – but that work didn’t emerge in isolation. History’s “great geniuses” (if I’m allowed to sucumub to broad generalization here) rarely worked alone. They had wives who quietly absorbed the labour of ordinary life while they disappeared into a study for twelve uninterrupted hours. I obviously don’t have that. In fact, few of us do. I have a job, a family, deadlines, laundry and a daughter who couldn’t care less that I’m about to crack the third act or not. What I also don’t have are parents with a fat chequebook, a trust fund, a family estate, or even the sort of surname that makes institutions instinctively assume I belong there. I grew up with a single immigrant mother who worked her way up from nothing, and I mean that quite literally from nothing: from scrubbing floors to earning a degree and becoming a librarian. My family tree sits at the intersection of almost every social, financial and genetic disadvantage imaginable, none of which appear to have been assembled with my future artistic career in mind. What I do have, however, is access to AI. But AI doesn’t write my stories. It asks questions. It challenges my weak ideas. It points out inconsistencies. It plays devil’s advocate. - Quite often, I’ll admit, it also gags on its own syntax, hallucinates complete nonsense and produces prose so lifeless it could be mistaken for a corporate wellness newsletter. But despite all that, it gives me something that, for centuries, was largely reserved for people with money, status or institutional support. Like an editor who never gets tired. A researcher available at midnight. A second pair of eyes when everyone else has gone to bed. A place to test an idea, dismantle it, rebuild it and test it again. The decisions are still mine, so is the taste, and the authorship. AI didn’t replace genius. It dismantled the monopoly around it. AI doesn’t level talent. It levels access. Now, someone sitting at a kitchen table, after putting their child to bed, can give themselves over to their creativity, even if only for an hour, because there is finally a recipient for the half-formed thought, someone to test it against before it disappears into oblivion. That doesn’t guarantee great work. Nothing does. But it gives more people a genuine shot at attempting it. And perhaps that’s what makes so many people uncomfortable. AI doesn’t simply threaten certain kinds of labour – it threatens the old gatekeeping structures around who gets to think of themselves as an artist in the first place. To me, that’s not the death of creativity. It’s one of the most democratic things to happen to it in a very long time.