On storytelling

For a moment, I thought that a lasting remnant of humanity post-LLM, and wider ML-shit(‘mUhCHeEne luRrnin’) would be that of storytelling. When all is said and done and us meatbags have abstracted all we can into our machines and processes, we can sit around and tell stories.

As if true, this would siphon storytelling off as an element of being uniquely human and robot-proof, but clearly this is not the case. We read fiction, we love fiction. Hell we read fanfiction. Fake stories among their real ones manifest no quarrels from us. Even the possibility of a fake story being real matters little, less so who explicity wrote it or was inspired by it (these are significant to us, yes, but ultimately so much as they add huamn gravity to good story. No one cares about an author or LLM that writes a shit story).

Even so, stories are what we tell when the machines are put to bed. Stories can function as a single tool in conversation to an entire life philosophy: “Do what makes for the best story”.

Hopefully the next good story you or I manifest is not our last.