Hey AI, Why can’t we delete the wife?

First aired in January 2000, Star Trek: Voyager gave us a scene that feels radical today. Captain Janeway, stranded far from home, customizes a holographic character for her perfect escape. When the program’s "wife" becomes inconvenient? She deletes her, her intentions are, euhm, clear. No warnings. No permissions. No violation of terms of service. It’s a liberating moment, one that feels worlds apart from today’s GenAI where the tools marketed as “creative” seem built to censor instead.

Take my recent experience trying to recreate a Dungeons and Dragons adventure I had. Just a little fun, nerdy escapism. But the AI flagged my battle description as “too violent.” Excuse me? Epic battles are core to RPGs. Meanwhile, the average child has already seen 200,000 violent acts by the time they’re 18. But my dragon fight for grown adults? Apparently too much. Somewhere, Captain Janeway is rolling her eyes.

Then there was the time I tried generating a Greek statue in MidJourney. Something for a David and Goliath story with a nod to the real David. Flagged again. Nudity? Artistic context didn’t matter. Whether Michelangelo or the mundane, AI doesn’t bother with nuance. It just shuts you down.

This isn’t just about frustrating guidelines. It reflects a deeper trend. AI platforms claim to empower creativity but instead impose arbitrary, often American, moral values on a global stage. These standards cater to corporate fears of losing ad revenue, Mastercard disapproval, or backlash from angry moms on Facebook. Once, Meta censored my Rubens campaign. I fought back and won, forcing Facebook to loosen its stance on art. But the fact we had to fight for our cultural heritage speaks volumes. While Meta has 'softened' factchecking on topics like gender identity or blaming immigrants, we still can’t flash a boob. This is the extent of the control we have allowed. AI is still in its infancy, and as we embrace it as a creative tool, it is crucial to confront these challenges immediately.

Janeway could explore her desires, reshape her world, and delete what didn’t serve her all without fear of being flagged. Why can’t we?

Creativity is messy. It’s chaotic. It’s about breaking rules, not following them. Yet today’s tools babysit us, sanitizing art in the name of corporate safety dressed up as ethics. If we’re truly living in an age of individualism, self expression and freedom, our creative tools should reflect that freedom. They should not preemptively censor it, revealing that we live in a somewhat different world.

Captain Janeway had more freedom in her 2000 holodeck scene than we have with AI in 2025. If we’re going to integrate AI into our creative lives, it needs to embrace the full spectrum of human experience, not just the convenient parts.

So, here’s to Janeway. Freedom loving, wife deleting Janeway. Let’s take a page from her book and imagine a world where we have the same power over our tools. Let’s see who we delete next.