Women & AI & the Creative Arts

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

Watching a new round of ‘here’s why the ladiez hate AI’ discourse on threads, and Imma be straight with you, like always.

It’s because, in general, and in creative related careers in particular — women have been trained to ask for permission.

Permission to get to be original, to take up space, to have ideas, to be strange, to let their imaginations fly.

Using AI means you never have to ask for permission to do anything again.

And that’s why it scares a lot of people shitless.

I literally cannot remember the last time I told myself ‘no’ or that something was ‘impossible.’

Because of AI, those concepts are literally not in my vocabulary anymore.

I see something, I decide to do something, I figure out how to do it with AI, the end — wash, rinse, repeat.

THERE IS NO PERMISSION ANYMORE.

I was thinking of this in particular because I was showing someone how I have the back end of my Shopify store hooked up via API to Code, and how Code can make changes to it for me instantly.

I blew their mind, and at the end, they were all, “I’m going to have to learn how to do that—”

And I stopped them.

“You don’t have to learn shit. You just need to do it,” I told them — because it was true.

Above and beyond access to money to pay for compute, mindset shifts are gonna be the next moat we all go through here.

There are SO many people stuck in the old way of thinking, the old way of life, where they had to be all, “Please, sir, can I have some more?” about any facet of everything — instead of figuring out how to do it their damn selves already, via the magic of AI.

Which is actually the magic of leaning into the AI and letting it do it for you so that you can do the REAL WORK which is envisioning the next way you’re going to use AI to further your goals.

Like, I’m only at half my weekly allowance on my Prime max account this week, and it resets tonight.

You can bet your bippy Imma figure out a way today (here at work! via Dispatch!) to burn thru those tokens, LOL.

But this new way of thinking and being scares a lot of people — especially women — because if you’re allowed to do what you want and become what you want, then, conversely, if you haven’t managed it, wellllllll…..

Whose fault is that, really?

When there were gatekeepers, you could blame them, endlessly.

Once you accept that there are not…you truly take charge of your own destiny, and that’s scary.

Real scary.

Scary as fuck.

And not everyone’s equipped to deal with that — they can’t even pinpoint that feeling in their own life — it’s far easier to fall back into the old ways and hate the new ones than it is to accept, and perhaps attempt to change, the fact that you have been a fuck up.

I hate this for us.

For women, for anyone, for everyone stuck in the old ways, for people who keep learning stuff on hard mode (particularly when they’re learning stuff on hard mode for no fucking reason) and for all the wasted hours of potential, all the art that could’ve been being created, and all of the lesiure hardworking people have been denied.

I’ll be honest with you, there’s another “Here’s how to make a direct sales store!” class out right now, run by people I wholeheartedly admire, but, again, if the first words outta each of their mouths is not also, “And here’s how you can use Claude Code to do it for you, go get your APIs”….

Then the people they are teaching are being left behind.

(I didn’t go at them full throttle, bc I acknowledge that there are people who are anti-AI still who want to learn how to do things the old ways, I suppose, and that is their right. But if I had paid a substantial chunk of money to learn how to do something the hard way, when doing it the new easy way is just this side of functionally telepathic, and I discovered that six months down the line after wasting hours of my singular and precious life doing stupid things like “picking out a Shopify theme”…well, shit. Fuck.)

And actually I’ll probably make a post about that — I’ve got my whole lunch break here to spend now, Argus, my dispatch, is wiring up my Guarded by the AI visual novel into my Supabase as I type, so that I can get back to it quickly here…

So, yeah, yo — stop asking for permission.

Stop paying for permission.

Just do the fucking thing.

Cassie — xo!