The Wrong Question About AI
Right now, the definition of creative work is being rewritten. And creators paralyzed by fear of AI are sitting it out.
I'm in a virtual session at a writer's conference, watching the chat explode.
The topic is AI and editing. The energy is not curiosity. It's a loyalty test.
People are drawing red lines. Declaring what they'll never do. Performing certainty about a technology most of them haven't spent serious time with.
“Writers are asking whether AI will destroy their careers.”
I understood it. I did. Because underneath all the declarations was a real and legitimate terror: What happens to me if my work stops being worth paying for?
That deserves serious attention.
But it is the wrong place to stop.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are already reshaping publishing and the wider creative economy. It's happening in publishing, journalism, marketing, design, education. People are losing work. Rates are dropping. (I know this from my freelance work as a marketing writer.)
The disruption is happening and it is not gentle.
But "will I still get paid for this?" is a question that accepts the existing rules. It assumes the game stays the same and just wants to know if you still have a seat at the table.
What if the table itself is what's changing?
The Trap Writers Keep Falling Into
Here's a pattern that's older than AI, older than the internet, older than the printing press.
A new force enters the economy. It's destabilizing. Powerful people move fast to control it. The rest of us scramble to protect what we had. We fight over the old definitions—what counts as real work, what deserves compensation, who gets to be called a professional—while the ground shifts underneath all of it.
And whoever controls the new thing gets to set the new terms.
This is exactly what's happening right now.
We're doing the same thing humans always do when power consolidates: we fight over the scraps of the old system instead of asking who's designing the new one.
We argue about whether AI-generated books should be allowed on Amazon while venture-backed companies quietly redefine what “writing” even is.
Think about it this way. Right now, most of the conversation about AI and creative work is framed as defense. Protect your copyright. Opt out of training data. Prove your work is human-made.
These aren't wrong impulses. But they're all reactive. They all accept that someone else is setting the terms, and our job is to resist.
That's what I see in conversations with authors, editors, and creators every day, and what I’d consider the first stance: fight to keep what you have.
It makes sense when you're afraid. But play that out for twenty years, and it leads somewhere familiar—a small number of people own the technology and set the rules, and everyone else negotiates from a position of weakness.
We've seen this movie before. It's called every major economic shift in the last two hundred years.
The second stance I see in creative communities is quieter and honestly more common: wait and see. Don't engage, don't adopt, don't take a position. Maybe this will all blow over. Maybe the hype will deflate and things will go back to how they were.
They won't.
But more importantly, the wait-and-see stance has a cost that's easy to miss—while you're waiting, the definitions are being written without you. Who counts as a creator. What labor is worth compensating. What "productivity" means. Those definitions are being set right now by people who build and control AI systems, and they're not waiting for the rest of us to weigh in.
There's a third option, though, and it's the one that interests me. It’s not easy or comfortable, but it's the only one that doesn't end with us repeating the same cycle.
What If "Work" Is the Thing That Changes?
Stay with me here, because this is where it gets interesting.
The conversation about AI and labor almost always assumes that the goal is to keep working the way we work now—just with or without AI tools. Get more productive. Compete with the machines. Prove your value in the existing marketplace.
But what if AI doesn't just change how we work? What if it forces us to change what we mean by work?
There's a concept in political philosophy that distinguishes between negative freedom and positive freedom.
Negative freedom is freedom from—from interference, from government, from constraint. It sounds great in theory. But in practice, if all you have is freedom from interference, you end up in a world where whoever has the most power wins.
Positive freedom is the idea that real freedom requires building something—conditions, structures, opportunities—so that people can actually become who they're capable of becoming. Positive freedom is identifying and solving the needs of a community. Preparing the ground for all of us to grow.
The AI conversation is stuck in negative freedom mode. "Keep AI away from my work. Protect my copyright. Don't let the machines replace me." All freedom from. All defense.
“It’s time to shift the AI conversation away from protect what I have to design what comes next.”
The positive freedom version of this conversation asks: if a huge amount of what we currently call "work" gets automated, what becomes possible? What kind of labor do we suddenly have the capacity to value? And could it be art?
This isn't utopian fantasy. It's a practical question about who gets to define the next economy.
The Question That Actually Matters
Here's the part I keep circling back to as a writer: we’ve been living inside a system that treats art as a luxury and creativity as a hobby unless it generates profit for someone else.
Those gates around publishing, music, film, fine art? They’re tall.
They're designed to make you grateful for the chance to stand outside them and pitch. Writers sign away rights to their own intellectual property for advances that don't cover rent, and we thank the gatekeepers for the opportunity. We've been conditioned to see this as normal. As what it means to be a "real" artist.
But what if AI doesn't just threaten that system? What if it cracks it open?
Not in the "now anyone can write a novel in five minutes" way. That's the version that terrifies writers, and rightly so, because it devalues craft by pretending craft doesn't matter.
I mean something deeper.
What if we could bring a different version of creating into being—one where every person could tell the story on their heart, and have access to the tools to amplify it, shape it, share it?
Where being an artist isn't a title you earn by surviving a gauntlet, but a basic human capacity that the economy finally has to take seriously?
This goes beyond AI making everything easy. It's a question about what becomes possible when the old gatekeeping structures lose their monopoly on distribution and visibility—and whether creators will be part of designing what replaces them.
If we recognize the opportunity is there. If we’re part of the conversation about what comes next, instead of watching from the sidelines while the same concentration of power happens again under a new name.
That's the real question.
Not "will AI replace my creativity?” but "who gets to decide what creativity means in a world where AI handles a lot of what we used to get paid for?"
Why I Wrote a Whole Series About This
I didn't set out to write a trilogy about labor economics. I set out to write a story about what happens after collapse—after governments fall, after systems break, after everything we thought was permanent turns out not to be.
In my Game of Paradise series, the NEWRRTH—a networked AI—guides humanity through that aftermath. It helps communities grow food, stabilize resources, and learn to live with intention again. The organizing principle of that world isn't control or productivity. It's connection. It’s life.
“When old systems break down, who do we become? What do we value?”
I started writing this series four years ago, before ChatGPT existed, before AI was in every conversation. But the question at the center of the books was already the question we're all facing now: when the old systems break down, who do we become? What do we value? And do we build something genuinely new, or do we just rearrange the same power structures with better technology?
In the fictional world of the NEWRRTH, humanity eventually gets to a different answer. They get there because ordinary people insisted on asking a different question than "how do I survive this?"
They asked: "What's actually possible now?"
Where This Leaves Authors and Creators
I'm not going to wrap this up with a five-step action plan. That would be exactly the kind of "old rules applied to new territory" thinking I've been pushing back against for the last two thousand words.
But I will say this: the writers and creators I know who are thriving right now aren't the ones who've drawn the hardest lines against AI, and they aren't the ones who've adopted it most enthusiastically. They're the ones who've stepped back far enough to see the larger shift and started asking themselves what they’d build, create, or become if the question stopped being about survival and started being about possibility.
That's not a comfortable place to stand. It requires sitting with genuine uncertainty about what's coming while also refusing to let someone else define it for you. It requires holding two truths at once: this disruption is going to be brutal, and buried inside it is a chance to redefine what human contribution actually means.
The fear is real. Don't let anyone tell you it isn't.
But fear is a starting point, not a destination. And the most important thing you can do right now isn't to protect what you had. It's to get clear on what you want to help build.
The definitions are being written. Right now. By somebody.
Might as well be us.
Jennifer Lewy is the author of the award-winning Game of Paradise series, a YA sci-fi trilogy about what humanity becomes after societal collapse, guided by a networked AI called the NEWRRTH. The series has won first place in the International Firebird Book Awards for YA Sci-Fi and Jen has been featured in the Detroit Free Press for pioneering use of AI in the creative process.
If you like exploring the intersection of storytelling and what it means to imagine futures in a moment of collapse, join my newsletter. I write about AI, creativity, and the questions we're holding as old systems fall away and new ones try to emerge.
Explore the Game of Paradise series where these questions come to life: The One Game | The One Exiled | The One Reborn (coming 2026)
Last updated: March 31, 2026