AI Is Giving Power Back to Regular People

There's a version of the AI conversation that goes like this: it's going to take your job, it's going to surveil you, it's going to make the already-powerful even more powerful, and the rest of us are just along for the ride.

I get why that story has legs. Some of it is worth taking seriously.

But there's another version of the story that doesn't get nearly enough airtime. And I think it's just as real, maybe more so. Because over the last year, I've watched AI do something that no one predicted quite this fast: it's started handing power back to regular people.

Not to governments. Not to corporations. To the person sitting at the kitchen table with a laptop and a frustration they've been carrying for years.

Here are two examples that stopped me in my tracks.

The subscription trap, and the people who cracked it

At some point in the last decade, a handful of software companies made a decision that changed everything for creative professionals. They stopped selling software and started renting it.

If you work in design, video, or photography, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Tools that used to be a one-time purchase became monthly fees. And not small ones. We're talking hundreds of dollars a year, sometimes more, for software that professionals need to do their jobs and that their entire file library depends on.

I've worked with video editors who weren't making enough in a slow month to cover their software subscription. But they had no choice. Their old project files only opened in that software. Their workflows were built around it. The industry had standardized on it. Walking away meant walking away from years of work.

That's not a business model. That's a trap.

So here's what happened recently, and it's worth paying attention to. A developer, one person, with fifteen years of experience, used AI to build free, open-source versions of seven of the most-used creative tools in the industry. Photoshop. Premiere. Lightroom. Illustrator. After Effects. InDesign. Acrobat. All of them, rebuilt from scratch, available to anyone, at no cost. (source)

Now, these tools are still early. They can't open every file format from the paid versions yet, and they're going to keep improving. But that's not really the point.

The point is that one person, with AI as a co-builder, took on a job that used to need a whole team of developers. The moat that these subscription models were built on, the idea that the complexity of professional software was simply too hard to replicate, just got a lot shallower.

And the companies that built those moats are going to have to start competing on value again. That's good for every creative professional who ever felt like they had no choice.

The TV in your living room, and who it's really working for

Here's something that most people know in the back of their minds but don't think about too hard: your smart TV is not really working for you.

It's working for the company that sold it to you, and for every advertiser that company has a deal with. The moment you turn it on, it starts collecting data. What you watch. When you watch it. How long you pause on a channel before moving on. That information gets packaged and sold, and the result is a device that sits in the middle of your home, in your most private space, gathering information you never agreed to share.

Most people have accepted this as just the way things are. The TV was cheap. That's the tradeoff.

Except now it doesn't have to be.

People are using AI to build tools that strip the ads, the bloatware, and the tracking out of their smart TVs. Some of these fixes take hours, not weeks. (source) And it's not just about blocking ads. It's about taking a device that was designed to watch you back and turning it into something that just shows you what you want to watch.

That's a meaningful shift. And the fact that it's happening, that the knowledge and the tools now exist to do this, changes the conversation. Even for people who will never do it themselves.

Because here's what it signals: the era of "this is just how it works, take it or leave it" is getting shorter. AI is lowering the barrier between a person with a frustration and a person with a solution. The gap between "I hate this" and "I fixed this" used to require a team, a budget, and years. Now sometimes it takes a weekend.

Quick questions

Is free, AI-built software ready to replace paid tools?

Not always, not yet. The free alternatives to the big creative tools are still early, and they may not open every file from the paid versions. Test any free tool on copies of your files before you rely on it.

Can AI help me stop paying for software I don't need?

It can help. Start by listing what you pay for and what you actually use. Then check whether a cheaper plan or a mature free tool already does the job.

Does AI really give small businesses more power?

In one important way, yes. It lowers the cost of building and fixing things, so you have more choices, and companies have to work harder to keep you.

What this means for the rest of us

I want to be honest: not everyone is going to clean up their smart TV. Not everyone is going to switch to open-source creative tools tomorrow. That's not the point.

The point is leverage.

When people have real alternatives, companies have to compete. When the barrier to building a competitor drops, incumbents can't coast on lock-in forever. When AI puts tools in the hands of the individual that used to be exclusive to the enterprise, the balance of power shifts, slowly, then quickly.

We're at the beginning of that shift. And most of the coverage focuses on what AI is taking. I think it's worth paying equal attention to what it's returning.

Because for the video editor who couldn't afford her subscription last month, and for the family who didn't know their TV was building a profile on them, the story isn't doom. The story is that someone, somewhere, used AI to build them a door out.

That's the version of AI I'm paying attention to. And I think it's the one that's going to define this era more than the scary version will.

If you want to think through how AI can work for your business, not against the people in it, that's what we do at Ascentis.

Sources: Creative Bloq, article on a solo developer rebuilding seven Adobe apps with AI (October 8, 2026); TechRadar, article on people using AI to remove ads and tracking from smart TVs (October 20, 2026)