AI Made Me an Author for an Audience of Two

Why the future of creativity may be completely private

A few months ago, I went on a short trip with my two boys. Somewhere along the mountain paths, I invented a story about them. Two characters emerged: Groonfinkel and Schoot. They were mountain creatures, sometimes brave, sometimes scared, often missing one another. They helped each other across difficult terrain, got separated, worried, and reunited. It was, in many ways, the story of my two boys enjoying this trip together. A real day of joy. 

In another time, that story would have remained exactly that: a fleeting moment. Something sweet, then gone. But this time, when we came back home, it was surprisingly easy for me to turn it into something tangible. With some help from my AI pal that shaped the words, another that helped bring the images to life, and a simple workflow that made production possible, the story became a small book. Not a product. Not content. Just a book for my boys. Something they could hold, reread, and recognize themselves inside. 

Much of the public conversation about AI focuses on whether machines will replace writers, artists, programmers, and therapists, leaving nothing for us to do. It is a conversation that reduces human value to economic output and productivity.

Underneath it, something quieter is happening. Something that has far less to do with economic value and far more to do with meaning. AI is radically lowering the cost of creation in personal domains. 

It is just like the beginning of human history, where creation was not a profession. But with the move into larger social units creation became specialized. Traditionally, writing a book now means disciplined effort. Recording a song requires instruments, studios, and technical skill. I know this firsthand. I recorded my own album, and it took me four years.  

AI quietly breaks this structure. This shift has something to do with who creates, and everything to do with why. 

The deeper impact of effort optimization is NOT that it turns everyone into a capable creator competing in a global market. That is the dominant assumption today, but it is hard to imagine so many people becoming meaningfully successful on the same public stage.  By lowering the effort related with creation and democratizing resources, AI may redirect creative energy away from cultural centers and back into families, friendships, and small communities. We may need fewer authors, not because stories matter less, but because storytelling may stop aiming outward toward an audience and begin aiming inward toward relationships. 

AI does not replace the human part of creation. It removes the friction that held it back. And if this way of seeing the future proves itself, then when creation returns home, something fundamental will shift. Creative value will start being measured by closeness. By whether it becomes part of a relationship, a memory, a shared inner world. 

It may mean we will all have more psychological permission to create without the need for large audience. To make things that exist only because someone we love needed them. 

That is not a smaller kind of value. It is a deeper one.

Many of us sing to ourselves in the bathroom. 

Be well, Amit