Storytelling is inseparable from human consciousness. Let AI not render them apart

The ability to speak about fictions, as bestselling philosopher Yuval Noah Harari says, is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. Nations, gods, money, human rights, corporations…fiction has enabled us to imagine things, and to do so collectively, en masse. Human civilisation is built out of these things we can all imagine, but which can’t be seen or touched. Storytelling, thus, isn’t just something humans do, it’s closer to what humans are, inseparable from our sense of self. We don’t know of any other species that sits around a fire spinning yarns. Still, we’ve got competition now. AI systems are producing novels and poems, mimicking famous authors, round-the-clock. Is this really scary, or no biggie? 

Many Sapiens are, of course, publishing AI content under their own bylines. In March, Hachette had to pull a horror novel, after readers spied an AI hand in it. Now, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner has drawn similar suspicion. Whatever the facts of these two cases, the reason AI-aided authors aren’t disclosing ‘how the sausage got made’ is that readers put a premium on authenticity. One countertactic the literature industry has to work on, at least in competitions where it’s individual creativity that’s being evaluated, is to ensure the entries have provable human origin. 

These’re minutiae though. What we have to consider seriously is, what all we give up when we surrender our authoring to the chatbots. In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall argues that just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations, exchanging stories has helped Sapiens navigate complex problems. It has ensured our survival. Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, all point to the centrality of Homo fictus to our ability to evolve behaviours as needed. From the pyramids of Egypt to the carvings of Ajanta and Ellora, the stories shaped the physicality. Newtonian to Quantum mechanics, are changing narratives about the universe. 

At an even more meta level, this is a question of consciousness itself. Consider the Malgudi Days world created by RK Narayan. It doesn’t exist on any map. But its small lives – Swami running away from school, or being scared of his maths teacher – are immediately recognised in near and distant cultures, as a place readers know. And feel. Specificity and universality are magically coexistent here. But what happens when words are generated by a system with no body that’s known hunger or racing heart, no soul that’s felt glory or despair? That’s a hollowing of one of the deepest forms of human connection. BOThors (that’s bot plus author, in case you asked) are very, very bad news for our sense of us.

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