The Future of Storytelling

A narrative essay on creativity, humanity, and the value of storytelling in the age of AI.

This is part 1 & 2 of an 8-part narrative essay for an upcoming episode of the Big Giant Heads podcast. Continue reading below or jump to a chapter:

• Part 3 & 4: The Magic of AI & The Immortal Machine and the Mortal Storyteller

• Part 5 & 6: Flash to the Future & Storytelling Today

• Part 7 & 8: Storytelling Tomorrow & The End… or The Beginning?

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Introduction

The timing was perfect. When the dot-com bubble burst, I landed safely in the accountability void of higher education. Almost unaware of the crash, I had been comfortably financing my art-school education with funny Flash games commissioned by various websites.

Flash was a plugin and creative tool that pushed the limits of what anyone had seen in a browser. Games, websites, animations. Whatever I could imagine, I could create with Flash. More than that, it was a tool that influenced how we created online. The hype was so big that entire industries, communities, and events formed around it.

Today, AI promises a similar revolution, but on a far greater scale. AI’s impact is so vast that it’s reshaping more than how we create. And as its effects accelerate, a bigger question emerges—what comes next?

If the friction between an idea and its execution disappears, how will we value this process? And if AI is eventually able to produce infinite creative works, indistinguishable from our own, how will human creativity be valued?

This isn’t a story for or against AI. I use it every day. This is a narrative essay on creativity, humanity, and the value of storytelling in the age of AI.

Part 1: Flash in the Pan

In the early 2000s, digital advertising was booming and Flash was its secret weapon. Agencies used it to churn out interactive ads, animations, microsites, and games faster than ever before.

But like any hot new tech, it wasn’t always about the work; sometimes it was about selling the novelty. For me, Flash games were the novelty I sold. For some clients, a game made sense. But for others I simply went along with their assumption that a goofy game would boost traffic to their website. “Race to the Afterlife” was a hearse-racing game I made for a chain of funeral homes. I made “Wrinkle Wars” for a plastic surgery clinic where you used a laser (or needle) to smooth out wrinkles on a series of rapidly aging stock-photo faces.

Did these games succeed in attracting customers? I’ll never know. But the ridiculousness caught the attention of a major humor website. And after 9/11, this site hired me to create “Wham! Bam! Saddam!” and later, its sequel, “Yo’ Momma, Osama!” These were downloadable games, easily shareable via email without Flash. Now you could blow the limbs off a cartoon Osama or Saddam with a click from your inbox.

By any creative standard, these games were trash, as was also written in a short Wall Street Journal article. Still, they were downloaded millions of times. It didn’t seem to matter how wildly offensive and politically incorrect they were. And what did I have to lose, anyway? At 19, working anonymously online, my world lacked any relevant stakes. That is, beyond the USD pouring into my Canadian child-savings account, deposited with special permission to clear immediately, allowing me to spend the cash as fast as the checks arrived.

Then the checks started bouncing.

The humor site, my biggest client, had stiffed me. Their business, like so many others, collapsed in one of the dot-com aftershocks. My assets were frozen until I could pay back the erroneously cleared checks. Suddenly, the industry sandbox I’d been playing in revealed its limits—financially and creatively.

Up to this point, I’d been making things just because I could. Now, I was about to enter the corporate world, where digital advertising and my creative skills still had a lot to prove.

Part 2: Stories That Sell

I learned quickly that advertising is creativity with rules. Flash had shown me new ways to create, but advertising demanded that creativity serve a purpose. Now I wasn’t just making things because I could—I was making things that fit a strategy, a target audience, a goal.

And to be honest, I like making ads. I like products. I buy products. Sometimes, I don’t even know I want something until I hear a story about why I need it. Because, at the end of the day, we don’t just need things—we need a reason to want them. And those reasons, whether social, cultural, or personal, are shaped by stories.

Advertising uses storytelling to lead you to one conclusion: Buy this. This persuasive form of storytelling has been used for millennia. Fables, parables, allegories. These are all stories that serve a purpose. From moral lessons, to survival strategies, to social cohesion. And, while this is a utility of storytelling, stories are most powerful when they give shape to ideas that mean something different to everyone—ideas like love, loss, ambition, and regret.

These are the ideas that truly shape our needs. And I keep coming back to them over and over, as a consumer of stories, and now a writer myself. But just as storytelling became the driving force in both my professional and personal work, the landscape began to change again. This time, it’s not a single tool or industry changing the game. It’s AI.

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