The Butt Ugly Weblog

Your AI is not a storyteller

The idea of AI as a creator goes deep into how you actually view your media consumption: Do you only take it as-is? Without context? Do you care about who made the music or the book? If you believe in the death of the author, as was argued back in the day, then yes, it is entirely possible AI will create a song or a book or a movie that you will like. It is in fact, likely, because AI can already create songs which are good enough to hit the charts. They may not be original, but honestly, not a lot of the modern pop is original.

Many people have argued this to me: I don't care who made the song/book/whatever, so AI can do just as well as a human. And I understand where they're coming from, sure. If you view yourself just as a passive consumer of content, AI will be perfect for you. It will produce personalized content for you to consume all day.

But humans like stories. We view movies from "that one director we like". Or read books from "that lady who writes so well". Or go apeshit about some band. If the trail ends up at "Oh, it's AI", there is no depth in the story. It's about as shallow as an ad. Heck, even Instagram influencers have more depth, no matter how inane they are. At least they're humans you can root for.

But AI? No. It's content designed to use your limited time so that you do not use your time with things created by people, because people are expensive and needy, and they stand in the way of corporate profits. (Note that I think there are wonderful ways to use AI to enhance your own creativity or productivity. I feel even giddy about some of the ways I've used AI recently. But the massive majority of AI-generated content will not be done by individual creators, but the corporate content machines.)