ONCE UPON A TIME

The Future of Human Storytelling and Creativity in the Age of AI

Angus Finney

A futurist guide for everyone who writes, reads, listens or watches storytelling in all its forms.

Once Upon a Time is a book about storytelling - something that permeates everything from books, films, TV and theatre, to ads, podcasts, newspaper articles and politicians' speeches - and what happens to it in the age of AI. The ways in which stories are created, the effect that has on us as human beings and what we're going to do about it.

Looking at the differences between human creativity and AI-generated 'creativity', Finney, a world leading film and entertainment business specialist, argues that while AI systems, for all their surface fluency, are extraordinarily good mimics, they are not, on their own, moral agents, emotionally driven or bearers of lived experience. And while it may cut costs and save time, AI severs the apprenticeship that makes creativity and craft thrive. It diminishes our ability to think for ourselves, which in turn affects what we create.

Whether there is an existential crisis for creativity will depend on how well we understand AI and harness it to increase our creativity, not replace it. The drive for authenticity, properly understood, is not a nostalgic rebuttal of technology, but a deliberate choice, as tools and business models shift, to keep human judgement, responsibility and imagination at the centre of storytelling.