The Magic of AI

What happens when AI is able to write great stories?

This is part 3 & 4 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 1 & 2: Flash in the Pan & Stories That Sell

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

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

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Part 3

If we extrapolate AI tech, I can imagine it will eventually be able to generate great stories. You want another Harry Potter book? Just point your AI-wand and shout, “Rowlingus Profitum!” Boom! Bestseller. Flawless prose. Cinematic pacing. Emotionally calibrated just for you.

At first, it’s incredible. You get exactly what you want. You read one, then another. And in this one, for whatever reason, Hermione casts a spell that flips everyone’s gender. It’s an interesting twist, but it feels out of place in this world.

Because, however you feel about this topic, you know JK wouldn’t have written this. You’ve taken a world built from someone’s life, their choices, their struggles, and replaced it with an echo of the original’s magic. It’s fan fiction without the craft, all the copyright and no connection.

Stories aren’t just entertainment; they’re also how we connect with and understand each other. A good story isn’t just an idea; it’s a signal from one person to another saying, I felt this. Have you? This is my opinion. What’s yours?

The best stories challenge us to ask questions about ourselves, each other, and the world. Even the most fantastical fiction—time loops, alien civilisations, infinite multiverses—are built on human questions. What if we could go back? What if we could leave? What if we could be more than we are? Universal questions like these give our stories purpose. They’re how we make choices, define meaning, and challenge our limits—the things that make us human.

These stories carry the weight of humanity because they come from people with limits—people who have to make choices, take risks, and wrestle with meaning. The filmmaker fights for their vision with every frame. The writer risks a rewrite with every page. J.K. Rowling was rejected 12 times before a small publisher gave her story a chance. And its success wasn’t just because of the fantasy elements. It was about how those elements framed universal themes of growing up, the power of friendship, and the morality behind good and evil—themes drawn from her own experiences.

AI can remix, replicate, and generate. But it doesn’t fight for an idea. It doesn’t risk anything. It doesn’t know failure. And that difference matters. When someone takes pieces of their limited life experience and turns them into something greater than themselves—that’s the real magic of storytelling.

Part 4: The Immortal Machine and the Mortal Storyteller

I’m reminded of Terminator 2, when Sarah Connor admires the AI killing machine protecting her son.

The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him.

AI won’t stop. It won’t get frustrated, burned out, or too behind on emails to finish that novel. It will never get tired. It will never feel the crushing weight of responsibility, wonder if it’s wasting its potential, or lie awake at night thinking about all the things it should be doing instead of doom-scrolling through competing AI’s training data.

But we do. And we die. Hopefully in bed, surrounded by our loved ones and not by a Terminator.

Every artist, writer, and storyteller creates with the clock ticking. Every novel is a race against irrelevance. Every film, every song, every piece of work is shaped by the looming reality that one day, we won’t be able to create anymore.

That’s why it’s our limits—the very things we’re compelled to push, the opposite of what AI represents—that make our stories matter. Because our stories are shaped not just by the things we can do, but also by the things we can’t.

I recently read The Denial of Death, written by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. He believed that all human creativity is a battle against oblivion. He argued that art, stories, and culture exist because we can’t cope with the idea that we’ll one day be forgotten. As he put it,

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

That’s me!

But those War on Terror Flash games I made all those years ago—I wasn’t exactly thinking about my legacy when I made them. And, as trashy as they were, they’re unfortunately not lost to oblivion, and will always be part of this story…

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