Letter #201: The End of the Story

No Creator, No Creativity

Spence!

A few weeks ago, I journeyed to the Catholic University of America to watch you and Ross Douthat discuss your respective books. (I was the bald man wearing the “We are not related,” sweatshirt.) Afterward, amidst the riotous applause, I was approached by a gentleman I used to know out in Los Angeles, a fellow screenwriter and a fellow member of a secret society of Hollywood conservatives secretly called Friends of Abe.

“How are things out there nowadays?” I asked him. He said: “A lot of writers are terrified they’re going to be replaced by AI.” And I, with my famously tender concern for the suffering of my fellow mortals, laughed right heartily and replied: “If a writer can be replaced by artificial intelligence, he should be.”

If that sounds like I have no sympathy for writers who can be replaced by AI, it’s because I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. All those screenwriting manuals they read telling them about the three act structure and the stages of the hero’s journey and on what page — I’m not kidding here — on what exact page various story beats and reveals and act breaks must appear. Why should a machine not be able to reproduce such mechanistic structuring? And yes, the same audience that crowded into the ninth reboot of Spider-Man’s origin story will surely crowd into Spider-Man AI and think it’s just as good. And it will be. The Writers Guild will no more be able to protect these scenarists from obsolescence than the Buggy Whip Makers Guild could keep that trade alive after the invention of the automobile.

Because here’s the thing. All of this machine-like precision in the approach to story form is a symptom of the death of faith. Works like The Golden Bough, which catalogued the myths of the world as a roundabout way of debunking Christianity, were connected to thinkers like Freud and Jung who saw the forms of myth growing out of the internal shape of human nature. That led to thinkers like Joseph Campbell, whose Jungian outline of the hero’s journey informed Star Wars and all its ilk. And that same mindset gave rise to thinkers like Yuval Harari who believe that every non-material value is just a story made in the image of our interior concerns.

But what if our inner nature is created in the image of a source outside ourselves? Created, that is, by the same creator who gave us pangolins and red-lipped batfish and the aurora borealis and infinite other bizzareries we could never have imagined for ourselves? Then, see, the stories that we tell would not only partake of his infinite creativity but would communicate its beauty soul-to-soul through unique personal experiences that would make him present to us in ways ever new.

If you think you can get that through artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is what you deserve. But my question then would be: what is it about the word “artificial” that you don’t understand?

Love, Dad