In a Mirror, Dimly: Why AI Can’t Tell Our Stories and Why We Must

Today’s generative AI tools are flooding the media ecosystem with mirrored reflections of humanity’s digitized past, reconstituted as the future. Companies are rapidly embracing these tools as ways to automate the already endangered professions of storytelling and knowledge creation. Why should we resist? After all, telling our own stories can often be painful and risky, frustrating and fruitless, or just tedious. What do we lose by surrendering the task of creating and conveying knowledge to machines that promise to remove the psychological, emotional and epistemological friction of storytelling? This article explores AI’s unwinding of the inextricable bonds among storytelling, human wisdom, knowledge and purpose, and why our future depends on their renewal.