Arora points to survey data to frame the gap: a 2025 Pew Research Center survey found only 17% of U.S. adults think AI will have a positive impact on the country over the next 20 years, while Stanford's 2025 AI Index recorded far higher optimism elsewhere, with 83% of respondents in China, 80% in Indonesia and 77% in Thailand saying AI products offer more benefits than drawbacks, against 39% in the U.S. and 36% in the Netherlands.

Her examples are drawn from her own reporting and conversations. Anghami, the biggest music app in the Middle East, pays musicians from their first stream rather than after a minimum threshold, and uses AI to curate, tag and attribute creative work instead of simply blocking it. In India, she describes a Gurgaon founder using AI to reach clients beyond the English-speaking world, and a Chennai activist who taught herself to code with AI to build a multilingual gender violence-alert app.

She also cites China's AI-made micro-drama industry, reportedly worth billions, where one breakout film, Zombie Cleaner, was made for under $500 by a part-time wedding photographer in rural Yunnan and drew tens of millions of views overseas. Her argument is that AI lowers the cost of entering a cultural market, letting people in smaller cities tell stories in their own languages. The piece is a single author's argument, so its examples should be read as illustrative rather than independently verified.