No, I don’t need AI to catch up to my more privileged peers

For an alarming number of people, that’s a convincing proposition. One self-described “serial entrepreneur” declared in Forbes that AI will democratize creativity. OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati agreed: “Moving forward, I believe AI has the potential to democratize creativity on an unprecedented scale. A person’s creative potential should not be limited by their access to resources, education, or industry connections.” Rosie Nguyen, head of creators at the AI music creation platform Suno, posted on X her rationale for working for the company: Coming from a low-income background where it was difficult for her family to afford instruments, lessons, and studios, she could now “enabl[e] music creation for everyone.”

A “writer and creativity coach” on Instagram posted a graphic that pushes the same message: “I will not hear a word against AI from people who … can pay for therapy, don’t realize research skills are a privilege, are fluent in English because of class and caste … ” The same goes for an “AI-assisted” author on Substack, who defends his partially AI-generated books on the grounds that he wasn’t born to a literary family, lives in a high-poverty city, and has worked multiple industrial jobs. He writes — or, rather, probably prompts ChatGPT to write — that “between exhaustion and survival, the act of writing became a luxury I couldn’t afford.”

But all of these claims are built on the faulty assumption that money buys creativity. Privilege certainly helps with visibility and funding. Beyond that? Little else.

My parents are both immigrants from Taiwan who started learning English in their late teens. In grade school, I enrolled in remedial English classes, correcting the long list of malapropisms they had taught me and using my newfound expertise to write work emails for my dad and edit Facebook captions for my mom. In high school, the first time I published a piece of writing, my parents printed out a copy and sat down at the kitchen island, circling words they didn’t know — at least one every sentence — and asking what I meant by particularly involved metaphors.

At the time, in my naivete, I envied my friends whose parents edited their essays for school and who spoke with inconceivable fluency at the dinner table about geopolitics and Hemingway and the latest David Brooks op-ed.

To close the sort of gap that existed between me and my friends, AI partisans would have the immigrant kids use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas they couldn’t possibly produce on their own; use NotebookLM to spit out summaries of books they could never otherwise understand; and use Claude to reshuffle sentences to be as lucid, persuasive, and clever as their classmates.

They would, in other words, have artificial intelligence annihilate every part of the creative process that is difficult and therefore meaningful.

The struggle is the entire point. Creating something, like meditating or marathon running, is precisely about a process so intimately human that it is accessible to everyone. Jimi Hendrix taught himself how to play the guitar. Jean-Michel Basquiat never received any formal art instruction. Frank O’Hara famously wrote much of his poetry during his lunch hour. And Yiyun Li, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography, took her first writing course in college, with the intent of improving her English.

Art, after all, is often disruptive, transgressive, and countercultural. Many of its most influential scenes and movements were never greenlit by gallerists or heard in concert halls but created stubbornly, despite circumstance, in stolen time, by the poor and overworked and “uneducated.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for the disadvantaged to elbow their way into the arts. For every additional $10,000 in total family income, a person is about 2 percent more likely to go into a creative occupation. In the UK, less than 10 percent of arts workers have working-class roots. The homeless street busker looms so large in our cultural imagination, and nepo babies draw so much ire, precisely because it is so difficult to “make it” in a creative industry without money and connections.

But human creativity is not, as the AI companies and influencers would have us believe, only achievable once you reach a certain tax bracket. To suggest as much is morally reprehensible. There is no threshold of wealth or status you have to cross before you can create. You just have to pick up the pen.