The Human Touch in Storytelling: Why It Still Matters

Photo by Thiago Matos

I’m not going to make this about AI. But I’m a bit over constant the pressure and FOMO feeling that we could/should/will be screwed if we’re not using it more. It’s been super helpful where I do use it, so I’m not trying to knock AI at all. My unpopular opinion here isn’t about that. It’s about who/what we’re using to tell stories. It’s the utter gutter I’m seeing on our screens.

With all this digital noise and it getting more and more crowded with AI-driven content, don’t any of us feel like we deserve more, better quality content? I’m already at the point where I don’t trust anything I watch/see/read now! I’m adamant that we deserve better content.

However, I’m optimistic that the balance is tipping where viewers are eventually demanding more authentic videos to watch on their mind-reading feeds. As a company, we get sent a lot of briefs for human-driven stories and look for our own stories a lot. They need to be researched thoroughly, carefully outreached, crafted and told by humans. We really can’t replace that, surely?

People remember stories far better than stats, data, numbers etc. We’re just programmed that way because we’ve been telling each other stories for centuries. It’s shaped our lives more than we will ever realise. Civilisations have preserved their history and culture by retelling stories to the next generations. So many nuances make storytelling real; it’s fundamentally a human act. Storytelling is in our social tapestry, it’s rich with emotions, it builds social bonds and creates a sense of belonging. We do this at the dinner table with our families, at bedtimes with our kids, over coffee with our friends. All these connections are human, so we should be reserving a seat at the table where humans tell the story in the digital space too.

Lucas crafted and directed this beautiful story of an artist in Mongolia and I wonder... if the story was crafted using AI, what shape would it have taken? I'm not talking about visually, I mean story-wise, "the angle", the approach... Would viewers have taken something differently from it?

Wouldn't it be epically ironic if I used ChatGPT to write this?!