Writers are thinking about Artificial Intelligence a lot – understandably. The lovely (I’m a bit of a fangirl) Ben Rhodes, (I highly recommend Pod Save the World and Ben Rhodes Substack, both of which are free,) discusses AI in his recent post, ‘Why Write‘. He answers this question through describing the deep thinking that goes into composing an essay – the kinds of thought processes that increase understanding, to a level of awareness he could therefore not reach if AI were to write the essay for him.

All types of writers write, very literally, in order to think. We don’t want to circumvent the work of reflection by depending on AI. But then why not just write for ourselves? We could, in theory, expand our grasp of a subject only to shove our essay, poem, screenplay, novel… in a proverbial drawer. However, writing to be read, (or watched, or heard,) helps the thinking process. Our understanding increases as we work to make it clear for others.

Writing to be Read

So, what’s in it for the reader? Here I am, thinking away, but what’s the difference for someone perusing my reasoning over arguments assembled by the massive processing power of AI?

Change

In my last post, I stated that, in technical terms, a story is defined by the fact of its characters undergoing change. However, the question of insight, for both creators and consumers, takes us beyond what a story technically is, to what it is for. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster argues that a story is ‘causality’ – its purpose being to shed light on why people do what they do, its function being to help humans understand humanity.

All of the above rings true for me. Stories help creators think, consuming them is a way of exploring different perspectives and backgrounds from our own and they allow us to fathom a motivation that might otherwise seem incomprehensible. But to achieve any of that, a story has to be generated by a person, bringing to bear their questions, wisdom and blind spots even as, in many cases, they fictionalise these things.

I won’t try to expound an exhaustive list of the purposes of storytelling, but I would like to add one more. It’s hard to find a western (geographically speaking) film that does not open with the following structure: character set-up, followed by an inciting incident, and then the protagonist (initially anyway) resisting this ‘call to action’, and yet, despite its ubiquitous nature, this model only feels unoriginal when a character is cliched. As long as character traits are believable, we viewers are happy to give ourselves over to this same storytelling framework again and again. Could this be because there is something very specific the majority of people are striving to understand? When those movie protagonists stop resisting their calls to action, and begin the difficult process of changing as people, are us viewers encountering not only that change is possible, but how it can be attained?

Is the reason that every story is about change that humans find change hard? No doubt an AI search engine could affirm the human capacity for transformation by compiling some real-world examples of people who’ve achieved it. How did those individuals do it though? Surely stories are the most universal way to examine such a nuanced progression, but only if written by human beings. When a large langue model creates a story, its ‘inspiration’ is the phrases it commonly found together back when it was trained on all the words on the internet. Its creative method is detached from life and living. When a writer wants to understand something, and in order to do so takes their observations and experiences to forge a character their readers or audiences will recognise as real, and then asks of that character, ‘Can you change?’ that’s when a story is fulfilling its purpose, in expanding our collective understanding of what it is to be human.