When Machines Dream: The New Age of Storytelling
Humans have enjoyed a comfortable seat at the top of the food chain for thousands of years. Why? Because we might have won the evolutionary lottery with our pre-frontal cortex enabling intelligence and cognitive abilities beyond any other species’ capacity. However, intelligence is only an enabler of other more defining, valuable traits. After all, if intelligence were the optimal evolutionary strategy, wouldn’t we see it more widely in nature? Bats evolved echolocation, one salamander species evolved to be solar-powered, and other animals, like the tardigrade, can survive in extreme conditions — unlike humans.
A lone human is feeble compared to other sturdier animals, but billions of humans cooperating with one another make us the dominant species.
It’s clear then that humanity’s most defining trait enabled by intelligence is cooperation — the ability to work with one another on a grand scale. By cooperating with one another, we’ve established nations, trading networks, social norms, and laws that allow us to innovate, deploy technology to tweak nature at our will and construct a shared reality. Without cooperation, an individual, no matter his or her intelligence, would not survive in the wild compared to other faster, stronger, and more adept animals.
So, how are we able to cooperate? Through stories. Our shared narratives underpin humanity’s profound ability to collaborate at a grand scale — stories are the very essence of what makes us humans. They are intricate fictions, narratives we share to establish a unified stage, a perceived base reality. At this stage, we come together and find ways to cooperate and flourish as individuals within the collective.
Here are a few stories that have profoundly shaped our world:
Myths & Culture: Tales that serve as foundations for cultures and nations. Every culture has its set of myths that embody its values and beliefs, binding and inspiring them to provide a sense of identity and belonging. Rome was founded by two brothers — Romulus and Remus — fathered by Mars and nurtured by a she-wolf. Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, was founded by the Mexica people after leaving their homeland, following orders of their god, Huitzilopochtli, to build their new home where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus eating a snake.
Nations: A large body of people unified by stories of belonging, brought about by perceived similarities like history, culture, or language, drawing imaginary boundaries around a territory and sometimes creating dangerous narratives — us vs. them.
Money: A medium by which we exchange and assign value, often taking the shape of coins and banknotes. Today, money is not backed by physical commodities like gold but by our collective trust in it and the institutions that issue it. We choose to believe in money, and therefore, it acquires value. Without our belief, money would just be a digit on a screen or a piece of paper.
Corporations and Brands: We agree that certain trademarks and names represent entities that can own property, employ people, and sell goods and services. They are even treated as people in the eye of the law. Brands often have a story behind it, providing employees a reason to spend a lifetime working for a ‘true cause’ and giving consumers a reason to spend their money on a product or service. After all, consumers don’t buy the What; they buy the Why.
Religion: Perhaps religion is how cooperation started. Humans have an innate curiosity, a desire to learn how the world came about. I imagine early humans sitting around the fire after a long day of hunting and gathering, asking themselves endless and impossible questions. Why are the stars shining above? Why is there something instead of nothing? Who or what created all of this? How ought we to behave? And perhaps the birth of religion began when we answered these questions, and those humans who were better storytellers created early religion.
Ideology: A system of ideas and ideals forming the basis of economic and political theory. Slavoj Žižek explains that ideologies can become dangerous stories you subscribe to without knowing. Ideology is unfreedom that you sincerely experience as freedom, and its necessary ingredient is to distance itself from another ideology and denounce its other ideology as ideology. I.e., capitalism vs. communism, secularism vs. fundamentalism, environmentalism vs. industrialism, AI optimism vs. AI pessimism.
Stories have explained and defined the world around us, and in turn, they define us, making us operate in a specific way. Often, without realizing it, we surround ourselves with symbols and institutions that align with a story, and as history has shown, humans are willing to sweat, bleed, and die for such stories. They are powerful influences because they tap into our desire for structure, meaning, and belonging, making us susceptible to thoughts and ideas that are not our own.
Since the dawn of time, stories have been passed down through generations, evolving with each retelling and becoming enriched, for better or worse, by each storyteller’s personal touch. Today, there’s a change of paradigm before us — Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the first tool in the history of technology that can create stories.
AI now wields the power to craft stories that mimic human tales’ depth and complexity. Through sophisticated algorithms, vast databases, and deep learning techniques, AI systems can analyze patterns in literature, images, music, and films and produce mind-blowing output. This isn’t speculative fiction. AI models have showcased beautiful art, like the MoMa’s exposition — Unsupervised: what would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? These models can now create scripts and books. One of the Writers Guild of America’s demands is to regulate the use of AI in writers’ rooms. Even now, a Protestant church in Germany offers services led by ChatGPT avatars.
So what will happen to society when AI crafts and interprets our stories?
Granted, AI doesn’t create something out of nothing. It uses vast databases of human creativity to come up with its creations, and if humans stop creating original content, AI might poison its own well — training models on generated data makes them forget.
What’s also worrying is that commercial AI models are not free of influence. For example, China is drafting regulations for generative AI, which would require the software to reflect the core values of communism to prohibit destabilizing output that might overthrow the socialist system or undermine national unity.
Artificial General Intelligence remains a far-fetched dream, and I will not argue whether AI is truly intelligent or not. Our biggest concern should be about the values coded into each AI model and the transparency by which we can see them. In a world where ‘simple’ AI feeds the media, we must be wary and selective about what information we consume.
More intelligence in the world is beneficial only if intelligent beings are aligned in their goal and purpose. I’m not a tech pessimist, and I believe technology like AI is the best path to improving everyone’s future. However, without proper education and transparency, humans will think of AI as infallible. Without proper alignment, wars and other grand-scale conflicts will arise.
Today, we must heavily scrutinize the stories and information we consume. Otherwise, we’ll undermine our ability to cooperate as a society. Responsibility is two-sided: it lies with the creator of technology and its users, the author of a story and its readers. Science and technology offer a boundless realm of possibilities. Like nuclear technology that can power or destroy cities, AI’s utility hinges on our choices.
