A Story for Creatives

[Disclaimer: the following story is not technically inspired by actual events. Details have been messed up for comic purposes and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead-behind-the-eyes, is coincidental.]

If you thought the war between AI and human creativity was almost won by the non-human players, think again. The fight for original creativity has taken a dramatic turn.

The Story so far…

In the not-so-distant past, AI wizard businessman, LetzCawlim Jam, created a groundbreaking piece of kit – an AI Chatbot, which could do some pretty cool tricks. But it had a not-so-nice feature – it stole storytelling creativity from unsuspecting creatives, mashed it together, and spat it back out for global consumption. No credit, no royalties, just an algorithmic heist of genius design.

The result? Jam’s piece of kit made him mega-rich. He bought the biggest yacht in the harbour. And he joined a very exclusive club – the Tech Bro Glitterati. Soon he was wearing a baseball cap, rubbing shoulders with world leaders and shaping the future of digital creation.

For the storytellers – it wasn’t so good. Their words and ideas were being plundered and reassembled, like some cynical cinematic remake. They were the underdogs in a battle against an AI-fuelled Goliath, watching helplessly as their originality was monetized and turned into ads for fizzy pop.

The Twist

Then, in a lovely stroke of poetic justice, another tech bro from China decided to play Jam at his own game. Using the same nab-something-whilst-nobody’s-watching tactics, this new AI prodigy reverse-engineered Jam’s technology, producing an even more powerful piece of kit. Faster, sharper, and eerily efficient, it outperformed Jam’s piece of kit by several miles.

And Jam? Well, he was hoist by his own petard, wasn’t he? The Chinese piece of kit wiped out huge chunks of Jam’s mega-wealth overnight. That massive yacht looked about to sink. The AI revolution had devoured one of its own.

The Rising Action – A new age of storytelling

 Meanwhile, the storytellers, those seemingly powerless victims, did what they do best: adapted. Accepting that AI was here to stay, they found ways to use these AI pieces of kit to their advantage. Instead of resisting, they turned AI into a sidekick, automating the mundane while preserving the magic of true creativity

And it wasn’t just AI technology which was inspiring storytellers. Creatives realised that they could use other emerging technologies, mixing them up in creative ways, to tell new stories in new places: stories geolocated with space tech, popping up in places where stories had never been told before; or Augmented Reality stories overlaid on the physical world, bringing history to life, envisioning the future, giving voice to hidden and silenced characters;  or digitally immersive stories, appearing alongside the traditional formats – digital actors outside cinemas, with subplots and add-ons to entice and delight audiences. Creative storytelling became even more creative.

Some storytellers used AI to streamline networking, marketing, and production – things that drained their time and energy. Others leaned into the chaos, smart enough to turn out clickbait for an audience eager to consume it (because, let’s face it, there’s always a market for clickbait). Some even used it to turn out tongue-in-cheek pastiches plundering the lives of anyone in a baseball cap.

And the storytellers who wanted to create stories that mattered, did they stop coming up with vital stories? No, because they discovered something vital: AI pieces of kit were only stealing their ideas from the past, creativity already made and sent out into the world. AI content was always going to be second-hand. AI could never produce something truly fresh and nourishing.

Because here’s the thing: AI thrives on what has already been done. It’s a collector, not a creator. A recycler, not an innovator. It chews up old ideas, spits them back out, and calls it content. But human storytellers? They break new ground. They venture into the unknown. Freshly minted stories, done in new ways, for the present moment.

The Turning Point: enter the Cliché Machine

And that’s where things got interesting. With AI pieces of kit now scraping the internet and regurgitating their own output, the quality of the AI content began to nosedive. Jam’s AI piece of kit was always going to create stuff past its sell-by date – stuff already going off, irrelevant even as it was scrolling onto the screen. But now the internet was being flooded with self-referential, pre-masticated goop, becoming the landfill of content, with creativity on a downward spiral. The once-mighty AI pieces of kit were now feeding on their own recycled trash, leading to what storytellers jokingly dubbed ‘AI inbreeding.’

And it became clear: Jam’s piece of kit had a fatal flaw: if an idea, a phrase has been horribly overused, storytellers try to avoid it; but AI Chatbots do the reverse. If an idea or a phrase has been done to death on the internet, that is exactly what AI will barf out. The more over-used something is, the more likely it is to be in the AI library.

Jam’s once-revolutionary creation had deteriorated into a Cliché Machine, an engine throwing out the same tired tropes, the same predictable patterns, over and over again, getting more and more cliched with every new scape and churn.

The Resolution?

Creatives realised that having a Cliché Machine at their fingertips was really useful, actually. Thanks, Jam, they said. Storytellers now wield AI like a tool, not a replacement, but a filter, a detector of what’s been overdone. Ask an AI piece of kit to generate a plot, and whatever it spits out? That’s exactly what not to write. It’s a shortcut to identifying the tired, the stale, the already done.

Sure, Jam’s Cliché Machine, like all those AI pieces of kit, will evolve. The game will change, we know that. There’s always going to be a series 2, in a story like this. But for now, Jam’s AI Cliché Machine will be playing catch-up, stuck in the past while storytellers race toward the future. Now everyone can see the cliches clearly, because of Jam’s visionary technology.

And that is a twist no algorithm saw coming.

To be continued…..