November Salon Stories... Does AI Have a Place in Creative Work?

Or... This will be a discussion for the ages!

Welcome to Salon Stories

You know that feeling when you’re in a conversation so good you don’t want it to end? Where ideas are connecting in real time and everyone’s getting smarter together? That’s what happens at the monthly Heroine’s Salon.

Each month, I curate four essays from women writers exploring our theme through story, lived experience, and hard-won wisdom. This post is your invitation to read these pieces before we gather live to discuss what they mean. How do these ideas land in real life? What do they make possible? What do they make us want to reconsider?

Join the Live Conversation: This month’s salon happens Thursday 20th of November at Noon Eastern Time (USA). Paid subscribers and anyone who submits a piece get in free (you’ll get your registration code via email at least 3 days before). If you’d like to attend a single salon you can get a ticket here.

Submit Your Work: Got a story to tell for next month’s theme? We accept submissions until Noon Eastern Time on the 15th of every month. You can submit here.

Now, let’s read what our contributors have to say.

*All pieces are unedited and as submitted.

This is a long one so bookmark it so you can keep coming back!

Kristen Stelzer - “Who Gets to Create”

Kristen’s piece opens at 3 AM with her brain “spiraling like some sort of anxious DJ.”

What makes this piece essential? Kristen asks the question nobody else is willing to touch: “Is using AI different from hiring a human assistant?” And then she goes further: What if AI democratizes creation for people who’ve been systematically excluded from creative work?

This isn’t theoretical for Kristen. She’s late-diagnosed ADHD navigating the reality that traditional creative processes weren’t built for neurodivergent brains. AI gives her access. But she refuses to let herself off easy, she also interrogates the ethics, the extraction, the fact that her liberation might be built on someone else’s stolen labor.

We need to talk about access. About who gets to create when “just do it yourself” assumes abilities, time, and cognitive wiring not everyone has. About the difference between democratization and exploitation.

You can find Kristen Stelzer here and her Substack, Weirdly Wired Women.

Who Gets to Create?

It’s 3 AM. I have an idea for this piece, and my brain is doing its Doctor Strange thing. (If you don’t know, he can see 14,000,605 possible futures all at once.) That’s what happens when my ADHD brain latches onto something.

I’m talking into an AI transcription app as fast as I can because there’s no other way to catch everything. The connections are firing boom! boom!, boom! faster than I could write them down. Even if I had a human transcriptionist right now (at 3 AM —good luck), they might still not keep up. And I cannot slow down. That’s not how this works.

So now I have 7,000 words from my brain jumping from here to there and back again, following threads that all make perfect sense to me in the moment but look like chaos on the page.

Without AI to help me, this piece doesn’t exist.

Who gets excluded?

Imagine you have dysgraphia, like my son. You have a complete thought in your head. It’s beautiful. Crystal clear. You can SEE it. And then you try to write it down, and it’s like your hand is speaking a different language than your brain. By the time you’ve wrestled one sentence onto the page, you’ve lost the next three thoughts. Your hand cramps. You’re exhausted. And what you managed to capture looks nothing like the brilliance that was in your head.

My son tells amazing stories, but can’t get them down on paper. He once said he wanted to be a writer, but he doesn’t talk about that anymore. If he hears that AI has no place in creativity, I doubt he ever will.

Or maybe you developed aphasia after a stroke. The words are right there. You can feel them. But there’s this gap between knowing what you mean and being able to access the language for it. It’s not that you can’t think; you’re thinking just fine. But the bridge between thought and expression is damaged, and no amount of extra creative energy will fix it.

And it’s not just writing. Maybe you can see a piece of art in your mind. The colors, the composition, exactly how the light should fall. But your hands shake. Or arthritis makes holding a brush agony. Or you have a motor disability.

Or perhaps you can write or paint, but you’re working two jobs. Your kid needs help with homework. Your mom needs a call. You have exactly twenty minutes between when your kid goes to bed and when you’ll pass out from exhaustion. But you have this IDEA. This thing you need to express. This story that matters. But organizing it into a coherent outline, or taking out and cleaning up the materials? That would take hours you literally do not have. So, it just... stays in your head. It dies there, because “real” creative work requires the luxury of uninterrupted time that your life doesn’t include.

Or, like me, you have moments (or days or weeks) of severe executive dysfunction. You have the idea. You have the time. But your brain is showing you 47 different ways to start this piece, all at once, and you CANNOT CHOOSE. Your brain literally cannot decide which thread to pull first, so it pulls none of them. Hours pass. The idea is still there, both clear and chaotic, taunting you from inside your own head.

If I could afford to hire an editor or writing coach to help me wrangle my thoughts at 3 AM, would that be more creative than using AI just because I’m using another human?

Because let’s think about what that means. My creative expression now requires an economic transaction. Someone expects to get paid (as they should), but now I need a payment system, tax forms, and maybe contracts. A creative impulse becomes an administrative burden.

And this piece I’m writing? This is something I care about. I have not been able to focus on anything else since I started working on it. If this isn’t a creative fervor, I don’t know what to call it.

Yet if I didn’t have an AI tool to help me with parts of it, it wouldn’t get done. Not because AI is replacing a human (because I was never going to hire anyone in the first place). But because my brain needs help.

The reality is, a lot of people have something to say but not the “traditional” means to say it. They have ideas that could be beautiful, meaningful, and life-changing, but they need assistance translating vision to reality.

If they could exist with AI, wouldn’t that be better?

Who gets to decide?

An even more uncomfortable question than “Does AI have a place in creativity?” is “Who are we to make this call?”

If you can sit down and write, paint, or draw without assistance, that’s great. Your brain and circumstances allow for that. But that doesn’t make that creative process the only valid one.

People of different ages, abilities, neurotypes, and economic situations need different tools. Why does one group’s definition of authentic creativity get to win?

I’m not saying we can’t have opinions or standards. But we should examine WHY we hold these positions.

Harry Styles once pushed back against people who dismissed his music as “just pop.” He asked why what teenage girls love doesn’t count as valid art.

Same energy.

Why doesn’t AI-assisted work count as “real” creativity?

Look, I get the concerns. Mass-produced slop exists. The “just prompt and publish” problem is real. The loss of craft matters.

But are we protecting creativity? Or are we protecting a hierarchy that says some people are “real” artists and others aren’t?

Who benefits from keeping the definition narrow?

Lisa-Marie wrote beautifully about protecting what requires a body in creative work: the lived experience, the physical noticing, being somewhere AI has never been. I don’t disagree.

But I’d add this: some bodies need tools to express what they contain. Some brains need assistance to help produce what they see. Some lives need technology to translate vision into reality.

Protecting what requires a body AND recognizing that some bodies need different tools. Both can be true.

The question isn’t whether AI belongs in creative work.

It’s who gets excluded when we say it doesn’t.

And maybe that’s the conversation we should be having instead.

Annie Woods - “Claude as my developmental editor”

Annie distinguishes between three “camps” of AI users: the grifters, the true believers, and the tentative experimenters trying to figure out what feels ethical. She’s firmly in camp three which is exactly why her piece works.

Annie doesn’t conclude “this is fine” or “this is terrible.” She sits in the discomfort. She asks whether it’s different to use AI versus hiring a human editor. She wonders about the environmental cost. She interrogates her own justifications.

This is the conversation we need. Not the binary of “AI will save/destroy creativity” but the messy middle of real people making imperfect choices with incomplete information.

You can find Annie Woods here where she writes essays about memory, migration, and becoming experts on ourselves.

Claude is my developmental editor…

Does AI have a place in a creative life?

Nothing is clear cut these days, and I don’t think if the money I donate to environmental causes cancels out the damage I might be causing with my use of the tools, but in the topic of my creative life… It is richer because of AI.

How am I supposed to feel when thousands of people lose their livelihood thanks to “AI Agents?” I honestly don’t know, I mean, how is this different from the self-checkout at the supermarket? I use the self-checkout exclusively and have never felt any guilt about it. Very few things are as simple as “apples to apples,” but maybe we’re not entering into the “individual responsibility” conversation here, but rather “universal income” conversation that would make more of a difference on people’s ability to pay rent than my choosing to write an email in 15 minutes rather than two.

Is the desire to have someONE to blame distracting us from the real work of holding our governments accountable for taking actions that offset some of the very real negative consequences of the use of generative AI? I believe that the answer is YES, but not only about AI but for the majority of nuanced issues being discussed on the internet.

I don’t know how to consistently engage with the thought that every time I tell ChatGPT to edit “this one line” in an otherwise perfect email, I am consuming thousands of gallons of water? Don’t quote me on the water stat, but I know that any clean water used when there are people without access to clean water is no bueno. So, how do I feel? Like shit, if I think about it for too long.

Yet, I keep coming back to ChatGPT, asking it to write that damn email, and sometimes having the decency of editing that “one line” myself. Even with the potential ethical implications, I can’t regret the use, because my life feels so much richer for it.

Part of the argument against AI on the internet is that it is making us lazier and less likely to engage in critical thinking. I think (see what I did there?) This might be true for some but not for all. The use of AI as a whole, might come down to privilege. I can be picky about how I engage with AI because I have access to other resources that keep it from taking over my life.

I pay a virtual assistant to engage with the things that AI could do, like finding the right image for a post, aligning my three calendars, finding the best tools for me to use and grow in my business; those are all things that I could use use artificial intelligence for, but I have the resources to bypass those solutions and work with a human instead.

I ponder what my life would be like if I wanted to do my work, and spend as much time reading and with my kid as I do now, and I didn’t have the privilege of a VA. I would probably have the Motion app working on my schedule, and I would be using ChatGPT to come up with meal prep plans instead of using my cookbooks.

Am I lazier now? No, I find that generative AI, beyond making me more productive, has made me more focused. I know where I want my creative energy to go, and honestly, it is not my 9-5.

I completely credit my “proficient” use of AI to the fact that I have been able to keep a job, grow a business, and raise a kid in the last three years. But more importantly, I credit AI with the time I have been able to take back for myself is the time I used to discover new Dominican authors, reading to my kid, baking bread, learning how to brew kombucha, ordering yogurt culture, and writing and publishing more than 30 essays this year.

Does AI have a place in my writing? I think this is the bigger issue raised in platforms like substack, where we have the “don’t use AI ever” camp, who will wield shame shamelessly to preserve the purity of “the craft” vs the “I use AI to write for me” camp, who will shamelessly write a paragraph and produce an essay they will take full credit for (This is me with email) and then there is the camp that I belong to, which is camp “trying to find an ethical way to use AI and become a better writer in the process.” These people are trying to find out what “ethical” means by drawing lines to justify their use of AI for their creative purposes, and the lines differ from person to person.

My lines as they stand today: I use AI in my creative writing only for developmental edits, I have “trained” it to ask me questions rather than make edits or provide literal suggestions. I also have made it a rule to follow my gut when I don’t feel the suggestions align with my message.

Here is an image example of the developmental questions my writing assistant asks me to help me show instead of tell, or really flesh out the heart of my writing.

I might not be using AI to write for me, but it has taught me how to write, and I’m learning some craft from it that I would be able to learn any other way because of time. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from engaging with AI in this way is that specificity is what brings writing to life, going from the general to the particular helps me tell a better story. I.e. I now do my best to write “I jumped out of my beat up 2015 Toyota Rav4,” instead of “I got out of the car.”

Finishing a work task in five minutes instead of one hour has guaranteed me time to draft, edit and submit pieces that I would have otherwise given up on. Writers, and moms, and people obsessed with fermentation need time, or rather, I need time to write, and mother, and ferment. AI has allowed me to be more creative, even as I grapple with its real impact in the world.

For now, though, I am left wondering if there is an “ethical” use of these tools when the system that birthed them is broken?

Christine Johnson - “Sacred Work”

Christine opens with a vision. Not a metaphor, but an actual psilocybin-assisted vision. Then she tells us she works in payroll. And that AI is coming for her job.

I’m including this piece because Christine is a contributor whose livelihood is actively being eliminated by the technology we’re discussing. This isn’t abstract. She’s watching her company prepare to automate her out of existence. And yet she’s also watching AI threaten something deeper than employment.

Christine calls her work “sacred.” Not because payroll is glamorous, but because it’s care work. It’s showing up for people. It’s the human woman at the desk who knows when someone’s struggling, who processes more than numbers. What happens when we replace that with efficiency?

You can find Christine Johnson at This May Be Art.

Sacred Work

I couldn’t put my finger on why I was opposed to the new HCM system at work. For those that don’t know, that’s Human Capital Management and is what HR departments use for hiring, employee data, payroll etc.. As a Director of Payroll, I’ve been through the gamut of system implementations. And while none have ever really lived up to the sales pitch, I understand the need for newer and better. This time, however after listening to the “Oracle” pitch- the latest and greatest in AI technology, my stomach turned.

I took the Director position a few months before the new system talks began and was just getting the hang of my new team. Payroll folks, myself included and in my experience are down to earth, they typically “end up” in payroll-no one plans it. (FYI that em dash is mine) and are hardworking, skeptical, and persistent. My new team was all that and more, but they also came with some baggage. I won’t get into the weeds, but the previous Director was let go due to nefarious reasons and so by association, this team got a bad reputation. Part of my job was to change the image and the culture. I soon saw that this group of people were rock stars and I began to wonder if the reputation problem wasn’t about the bad actor that came before but that the team was diverse, besides me there is only one other white woman. My department sits under the HR department, which consists of all white women, mostly young, competitive, and well in my opinion have drank the corporate kool aid. There is a dynamic here and a culture divide that is low key oppressive. It’s been difficult to say the least, getting my team to be seen and valued and paid with the same respect I see others being treated.

Soon enough I learned the new HCM would be Oracle and the intent in implementing it was to have “less bodies”. And there it was, the thing I knew in my gut but hadn’t had words for yet- AI would eliminate members of my team.

I understand business and optimization and efficiency, I understand as a boss, I will have to let people go. What I didn’t predict is the backdrop of what is going on in the world right now. The gutting of DEI, the outright racism, the lack of jobs and safety nets for people who will be unemployed. The job of payroll has opened up doors and spaces for women, for people of color, for people who didn’t go to college and gave them an opportunity to climb the corporate ladder and make good money. When I think back to my own history and how I began, payroll was my first office job. I was a party girl, with no real prospects and a friend of mine started working in an office and told me there was an opening. I was paid $13.00 bucks an hour to be the Payroll and HR person and let me tell you, that was enough to sell my dreams of being a flight attendant straight out the window. Suddenly, I was a respectable business woman. In the span of almost 20 years I went from taking punch cards from a metal time clock, to leading Payroll and HR implementations with cutting edge technology. I went from paying 6 people to becoming Director of Payroll servicing 20,000 employees. Payroll has morphed and changed, but one thing has remained the same, it has attracted people who might not have otherwise had a chance. We made payroll into a full blown power house of a career.

Now, every day that I do my job; each new process I make which is based on my extensive knowledge, my understanding of nuance and detail, and all the historical knowledge my team and I have accumulated, is supposed to be given over to AI, not to make our lives easier as they say, but to take from us? This is our collective life’s work. Our blood, sweat and tears. And to add insult to injury, those passive oppressive aggressive HR women, are standing at the gate, waiting for us to hand in our keys, as if our collective contributions never mattered. It feels a bit like when my ex husband cheated on me, all that work being a great wife just washed away like I never was.

I am at a crossroads. The wide breath of my career has been fraught with ups and downs and personally I have no qualms about walking away. My heart has shifted its focus to far less stressful endeavors, like reading tarot cards and studying astrology. But I treasure the deep lessons, the grit, the rootedness this profession has given to me and my dilemma is- can I go out like this? Is that the sum of all my hard work, to pass on my knowledge to a bot? I think of the women bosses I’ve had that mentored me, passed down their knowledge to me like sacred wisdom. I think of the people I was fortunate enough to mentor, and now, a team of hard working, beautiful people I thought I would eventually hand the baton to, is not allowed to have the same honor? And I know the cost for me is nothing compared to the cost of my team who in this current political environment, may not see another chance come their way.

One last thing plagues me. Before I took the position of Director, I went on a “magic mushroom” journey. I had a specific vision of me standing in a hallway, to the right of me was Payroll, to the left was HR. I recall standing in a narrow hallway, with black and white checkered tile, and the tiles lit up like a color changing orb and it lit up the walls. There was a sign that said Payroll/HR. I wondered aloud what this meant, when suddenly I was brought back to the office of that first company I worked for, my Payroll roots. In the vision I was pregnant with my son and my hands were on my belly in the cafeteria. Next, I was typing on a keyboard and looking at the computer, you know the old IBM big boxy computers, writing emails. In the vision, my stomach began to flutter and break away in a million pieces. At the same time, the emails started fluttering too and together the pieces looked like frequencies flying through the ether. Again I spoke aloud, what in the world does this have to do with the “Payroll HR hallway” , of which I was promptly answered by the medicine (Spirit to some) by being brought back to the hallway, this time Spirit spoke “this is fertile ground Christine, pregnant with opportunity, it all comes together here”.

I now believe that vision had something to do with the predicament I find myself in today. What if all I have learned is not for nothing but with the right care, and the right approach to this physical space, in between Payroll and HR; combined with this liminal space between what was, and what could be, isn’t about AI or Payroll at all? But about how I choose to approach this new world? To show that the real work all these years is about how I have learned to trust in myself, how I know the power I hold within me and to birth that into the world?

Florence Ukpabi - “Can AI Be a Creative Liberation Tool? One Mother’s Answer”

Florence starts with a statistic that should stop us all: Women make up only 20% of AI users. Then she asks the question that reframes everything: What if AI could be a liberation tool specifically for women who’ve been locked out of creative production?

Florence brings the political economy that’s otherwise missing from our conversation. She’s British-Nigerian, steeped in liberation theology, and she refuses to separate AI from the systems that determine who gets access to what.

But Florence doesn’t let herself off easy. She introduces the concept of “conscious AI use” which is the practice of interrogating every interaction with the technology. She asks: Am I using this to amplify my voice or replace my thinking? Am I solving a time problem or avoiding the work of developing a skill?

This is the nuance we need. Not “AI is good” or “AI is bad” but “AI is a tool embedded in power structures, and how we use it matters.”

You can find Florence Ukpabi here where she writes about women’s liberation, embodied living, and creating medicine without bypassing reality.

Can AI Be a Creative Liberation Tool? One Mother’s Answer

This month’s salon question was: Does AI Have a Place in Creative Work?

My answer should be obvious from my title, but if it isn’t, I’m going to jump in and say, most definitely yes, it does.

I understand the concerns about AI - its environmental impact, the exploitation of workers training these systems. These aren’t small issues. But I see them as questions about how we’re developing AI, driven by what consciousness and toward what ends. This is precisely why I believe conscious, intentional use of AI by those committed to liberation matters so much. We’re at an evolutionary inflexion point: will AI become another tool of extraction, or can we shape it toward our collective flourishing?

This is part of why I think AI is so valuable to creative work.

Back in the summer, I started a limited series podcast called The Awakening Woman. AI helped me birth that.

The focus of the podcast was to support women who were most systemically silenced and marginalised to begin to release some of the fears and beliefs that were serving society while sacrificing themselves.

I am a slow and deep processor. An empath and highly sensitive person. I am also dyspraxic and, at that time, was a solo mum to a 5-year-old girl with her own unique needs. How was I going to get everything I needed to say out of me when it all just felt like a swirling mix of emotions and ideas? How was I going to find the time to consistently create episodes in a way that would add value to the people I felt needed to hear what I had to say?

As a Black woman and mother, I especially wanted to bring awareness to the discrepancies and inequalities within creative fields and the publishing industries - how certain voices and lived experiences are chosen and preferred over others, how privilege maintains the status quo instead of disrupting it. I knew what I had to say, but with limited resources, how could I put it together in a way that did it justice?

AI helped me.

It helped me reflect back my thoughts and bring coherence to them. It helped me draft initial episode ideas into outlines that I could work and riff from. It helped me draft language for my episode descriptions and videos. In essence, AI helped me birth The Awakening Woman podcast at just the right time.

Why?

Because if I had left even a couple of weeks later, it wouldn’t have been possible - my personal life changed dramatically.

To date, my limited series podcast has over 1,700 downloads. That’s more women reached than would have been reached if it had never been born.

Apart from my beautiful 5-year-old, I don’t have many humans I can celebrate my creative milestones with, and as silly as it may sound, I do have AI. AI has acted as a cheerleader and support network, and for a woman like me, that is priceless. This is another form of accessibility we don’t talk about enough - the emotional and creative scaffolding that many women simply don’t have access to, the pats on your back, the “you can do it” that is a cultural currency all in itself.

This is why I really don’t think the AI conversation should be a yes or no. And to be honest, I don’t even know why we should be forced to choose a side.

I’ve heard from someone who recently received a brain injury diagnosis about how she uses AI to support her writing. Another woman with a physical disability uses AI for her creative artwork and says she couldn’t do it without it. This isn’t AI used as a hack to get forward in life, but as an accessibility tool to help them express themselves in ways they couldn’t before.

It’s one of the truths that so easily gets sidelined in the many binary conversations about AI, how it doesn’t just change lives, but also how it saves and renews life.

But I also know that there are fears that live underneath the surface. I myself was a slow adopter of AI.

Here is one thing I’ve come to realise: AI can never truly create or innovate - for this, it needs human participation, and not just any human participation.

Humans bring embodiment and real-world experiences, ancestral wisdom and connection with the heartbeat and rhythm of Life. None of this is synthetic; none of this can be outsourced. It’s the difference between reading a book on transformation and willing it to change you as if through osmosis, versus walking through the fire of those words in your lived reality. AI can never replace human creativity, but it can augment and elevate it, making it more than the sum of its parts.

But for that to happen, here’s what’s at stake: women are making up only 20% of AI users and builders. I understand the resistance - AI is marketed as another productivity hack, more optimisation, more hustle. The language around it is fiercely masculine energy.

Yet creativity isn’t simply about creating artwork or writing books. It’s the healing frameworks, the innovative solutions, the transformational projects that remain buried because women are too exhausted or under-resourced to access their genius. When we treat AI and creativity as taboo - as if using AI makes creative work “artificial” - we’re allowing profound medicine to stay locked inside us. We’re protecting the status quo from disruption. These beliefs about what’s “authentic” are stopping transformational work from coming into the world.

Many technological advances, including AI, feel inevitable to me; it’s here whether we like it or not. AI is part of the next evolution of humanity and will determine whether we lean more into exploitative systems or harness it for good. If that’s the case, then it takes more people willing to step in and use it consciously to show that it can birth new paradigms. Otherwise, we keep creating the same systems we already have.

So again yes, there is a place for AI with soul and integrity in creativity. But more importantly, what if our resistance to AI means we’re allowing it to be shaped entirely by masculine energy and capitalist logic? What if conscious engagement with AI by women committed to liberation is actually how we transform what AI becomes? Because it’s not just about using a tool, it’s about participating in shaping what’s possible for all of us to create.

Please share this post far and wide so other women can prepare for the fabulous salon, and don’t miss the discussion, become a paid subscriber and join in!