J. Michael Straczynski, a man who knows a thing or two about storytelling,1 has a two-part essay on his substack about why AI has not yet produced a great manuscript, and might never.
Silence where a story might have been (part 1)
Silence where a story would have been (part 2)
AI is already being used to write manuscripts in collaboration with human writers. We know this because a handful of writers have been caught at it. But almost certainly there are writers who weren’t caught, and whose AI collaborations have been published.
He’s right that AI won’t write a story on its own. “Write me a story” is a laughably vague prompt. You’re leaving the details up to the model, which will produce an average of all the literature it knows about, and that’s statistically very likely to be mediocre.
If you prompt better, you’ll get better results. If you iterate, providing yet more specific instructions, you’ll get better results still. More on that is coming soon (I’ve been experimenting).
But you’re still the one steering the story machine. Straczynski’s point is that AI doesn’t do anything without a human telling it to. By its very architecture, it will never observe a weird little moment of human interaction and think, “I should write a story about that.”
I think it’s way too early to say conclusively that a machine will never be able to have that experience. But such an AI will be a lot more advanced than anything we have now… and it’ll probably have a body.
- Straczynski still holds a record for writing an entire 22-episode season of a TV show… twice. In fact, of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, he wrote 92. That’s not the reason he titled his 2019 autobiography Becoming Superman, but it’d be understandable if it were. ↩︎