The Great Unnerving: How AI Threatens the Soul of Storytelling
It’s one thing to replace a paintbrush. It’s another to replace the painter.
And yet that’s the line we now approach—not with caution, I might add, but with fervent expectation. With excited curiosity. Already we have talent agencies fighting to represent an AI actress, an AI music artist, and the AI “art” they generate. So, I suppose I should amend my assertion—we are not approaching the line, we are tumbling over it, full steam.
The real danger of artificial intelligence (as it relates to entertainment) is not merely that it can replicate our work, but that it can approximate our soul. And if a machine can do that convincingly enough, who—besides us—will object?
There is a strange silence that comes with AI’s rise. Not the quiet of peace, but the quiet of disorientation. Writers stare at blinking cursors wondering if their labor will matter. Voice actors hear their signature tones mimicked with eerie precision. Filmmakers watch a deluge of AI-generated scripts and trailers flood YouTube, each stitched from borrowed beauty and fed to algorithms that do not know the difference between meaning and mimicry.
When a machine can produce a replica of feeling, what is the value of real feeling? When you cannot distinguish between a song written from heartbreak and one generated from keywords, what happens to heartbreak? What defines heartbreak?
AI does not feel. It only mirrors.
And when society begins to prefer the mirror to the man—because the mirror is faster, cheaper, and always agreeable—the result is not progress. It’s flattening.
Hollywood is already showing signs of this collapse. Audiences are fatigued. Box office is slumping. Streaming has cannibalized itself. And the very companies that once sanctified the “human story” are now drafting contracts to own actors’ digital likenesses in perpetuity—after one day of scanning. And as I mentioned, they’re not stopping there.
What happens when an AI actor is capable of portraying the full range of human emotion, with such detail and precision that the human eye cannot spot the difference?
What happens when the AI musician is able to produce a song of such rhythm, such truth, such balanced melody that the human ear cannot detect the bot behind the beat?
Maybe that day won’t come. Maybe the AI artist will always have a tell, some small signature of sterilized origin that proves the definitive gap between code and soul. Should that be the case, we could rest in the hope that all AI “art” will inevitably fall short of the authentic human signature that true art bears.
But what if the signals we respond to when observing art can largely be hacked, mimicked, and programmed? What if we have saturated our modern art with so many superficial tassels and bells and empty messages that our audiences expect the sterile.
If AI can replicate enough of the surface, and most of today’s movies and songs and art only go surface-level deep… then what difference is there to spot?
I’m not posing rhetorical questions with some grand climactic resolution in mind—I’m genuinely asking myself these questions in real-time.
True storytelling survives not because it is efficient, but because it is alive. It comes from a place within the human spirit of shared experience that no other creature or creation can call upon. But the industry, in pursuit of efficiency, seems ready to forget that. The question is: are we?
Next time: The Infinite Palette – How AI Can Enhance and Empower Creators
