When Christopher Nolan recently cast a black actress in the role of Helen of Troy in his forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, it did not take long before Elon Musk responded.
Musk objected to what he saw as Nolan’s politically correct capitulation to woke ideology, but unlike in the past, when a critic might have responded with an opinion piece in an established newspaper, Musk used an AI-generated trailer in which European antiquity appeared as he believed it ought to.
The episode illustrates the development recently described by the German researcher Laurenz Günther in the essay “The Rise of a New Elite”. Artificial intelligence is in the process of wresting control over cultural production from the institutions that have long held a monopoly over it.
Two scarcities are disappearing
The most interesting aspect of Günther’s analysis is his explanation of why the transfer of power between an old and a new elite (today, between a liberal and a conservative elite) can now occur far more rapidly than in the past.
According to Günther, the cultural elite – journalists, authors, academics and film directors – has historically depended upon two forms of scarcity.
The first was the cost of production: producing high-quality articles, books and films required money, education and institutions.
The second was control over distribution. Without the backing of a newspaper, publishing house or film studio, one could never reach a large audience.
New technologies now mean that “a rival elite no longer needs to replicate the entire institutional machinery of the old elite” in order to compete with it. Social media, alternative media and podcast platforms have already weakened the distribution monopoly.
Now it is production’s turn, as artificial intelligence makes it inexpensive to produce text, images and video.
Politics has already shown the way
In politics, this shift has long been under way.
Günther points to Donald Trump as an early example of how to exploit the representation gaps left by the established parties (in Europe, for example, voters are far more conservative than politicians), and he notes that the political right now constitutes the most popular party family in Europe overall.
Political voices that once had to compete for column space in the major newspapers have increasingly found their way directly to voters without passing through the traditional editorial offices. Document is a very good example of this.
The new and more dynamic Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) is an example of effective political mobilisation through the use of social media to reach especially younger voters, as the editor of the website Modstrømmen and social media manager Mitchel Oliver explains.
From newspaper newsrooms to podcasts and social media
The same development is taking place in journalism.
Günther cites the Reuters Institute’s major 2025 media survey, which shows that, among younger age groups in the United States, social media and video platforms have now overtaken both television and traditional news websites as sources of news, while podcast host Joe Rogan alone reaches one-fifth of the American population with news and commentary.
At the same time, the proportion of right-leaning users on X has more than tripled since Musk acquired the platform. The editor’s gatekeeping function – the power to decide what could be said at all, and who was permitted to say it – is crumbling before our eyes.
The last bastion of culture
The development within film remains the most rudimentary, although the direction is clear.
Günther highlights the low-budget film Citizen Vigilante, which illustrates a striking gulf between critics and audiences: only 7 per cent of critics’ reviews were positive, compared with 94 per cent of more than 2,500 audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
Whatever one thinks of the film’s quality, the figures say something about how far the tastes of critics and the interests of a significant portion of the audience may have drifted apart. Musk has also announced that his company xAI aims to have a “watchable AI movie” ready by the end of 2026. It is precisely the kind of cultural production that resembles Hollywood, but without what Günther calls its liberal “coding”.
Whether it will succeed remains uncertain. But the cost of trying has fallen dramatically, and that is precisely the point.
The fortress walls of the old elite are crumbling, and its guardians – its gatekeepers – have lost their most effective weapon. The new elite stands at the gate.