The Fiction of Creator Sovereignty

Consumer sovereignty was the most flattering fiction in the history of economic thought: the market serves the autonomous preferences of freely choosing individuals. Galbraith spent decades demonstrating this fiction was structurally inaccurate. The AI economy has produced a successor fiction — creator sovereignty. The AI-empowered builder freely chooses what to build, how to build it, and on what terms. The builder is sovereign. The platform serves. The tool amplifies autonomous creative vision. The fiction is flattering and, by Galbraithian standards, approximately as accurate as its predecessor. The builder's choices are constrained by structures the builder did not create and cannot unilaterally alter — structures that operate at the level of tool design, access pricing, terms of service, training data curation, and alignment decisions.