It's the best time to be a storyteller

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. As I watched the launch video for the Sora app last Tuesday, I looked around wondering…is anybody else seeing this? Generated videos have passed the uncanny valley and you can now instantly cast anyone to be in a video to do anything you can imagine.

The past 3 years of advancement in generative AI technology is unlike anything I could have expected. But it’s a strange feeling. We are moving fast and we don’t know where we’re going.

It’s like we got on a bus to go to another city but then we look out the window. The bus is actually flying and by the way, the bus isn’t a bus, it’s a space ship taking us to another planet. For all the promise of generative AI, it’s just plain weird that the biggest AI native consumer product release of the year is a personalizable meme generator.

What’s particularly baffling to me as someone who studies the intersection of creativity and technology is that there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of notable advancements in storytelling. Let me define what I mean by storytelling - the narratives we communicate that teach us new things or give us insight into the human condition we otherwise would not understand.

The classic example of storytelling is the fairytale. Fairytales fantastically scared children (and childlike adults) out of making stupid mistakes with cautionary tales that taught important moral lessons and revealed truths about human nature and social values.

Storytelling is a deliberate process and telling a great story is hard. Generative AI based tools make it easier to tell stories by reducing the amount of technical work in production. It could also feasibly usher in a breakthrough in storytelling itself but that would take much greater effort and a different direction from much of the current explorations.

The issue is that the folks building these systems and a lot of the first adopters are too obsessed with mimicry. They are not trying to communicate fresh insights that reveal truths about the human condition, they are making tech demos mimicking the presentation of the great stories that did that task well in the past.

That is why much of what we see of AI generated presentation, while technically and visually impressive, feels weightless. It’s how we end up with a product like Sora, the infinite dream machine that is novel and fun to use but is shallow. It doesn’t come close to offering the weight, anxieties, or subconscious meaning that motivate the real dreams that haunt us and cast us into adventure. It’s why the product induces fear that it’ll usher in a world where it will feel like nothing is real and everything is possible - a society of lies where everything feels meaningless.

Shallow, duplicitous, and meaningless content didn’t come from out of nowhere. We should not pretend it did. Before there was AI slop, there was CGI slop in cinemas, content slop in our social feeds, and reality TV slop on our TVs. Sequel cinema and nostalgia-driven franchises have trained consumers to expect familiar formulas over fresh ideas.

The core issues were always there which is why generative AI native consumer products like Sora are trending in that direction. The criticism lies with the storytellers that have become complacent with their craft, relying on presentation tools to do the hard work and not setting the standard by telling stories in ways that are so undeniably seductive that it would be unthinkable that generative AI could pose an existential threat to the craft.

Great stories can cut through the noise and allow us to see things in fresh ways. We should not fear generative AI, we should be thinking of ways we can bend it to our will.

We should not be impressed by the Sora app, we should be disappointed that such an impressive technical breakthrough in presentation is being used to create memes. We should be at the forefront of what is creatively possible with these tools, not waiting to see if the next model release can create a more vapid facsimile of our creative inspirations.

It is a great time to be a storyteller but only if we have the fortitude to harness this technology to chart the path towards the future of storytelling instead of resting on the laurels of our creative past.