The New Age(nt) of Storytelling: GenAI thoughts

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Since about a year ago, I started playing around with generative AI, mostly to render playful images making fun of my friends in specific settings.

I personally deeply value storytelling, as it allows me to immerse my friends into the story, sometimes even letting them interact with it as it goes. Being able to ask questions like “Imagine being there” or “What would be your reaction?” can turn a fun story into a great one in my opinion.

So when the opportunity arose to use tools like Stable Diffusion to bring the stories in my head to life, it made my life very enjoyable. I could heavily abuse GenAI to make fun of my friends, having a monopoly on a resource that was foreign to them. I would even go as far as saying that I managed to match a friend of mine with his current girlfriend, due to her accidentally seeing an image I sent my friend, making fun of their “romantic escapades”.

(Image of me making fun of my friend)

But eventually, my willingness to teach them about this amazing tool backfired, and they also started making fun of me – touché.

(Image of my friend making fun of me)

To my surprise though, even the guys who had previously told me that they disliked coding and “technology” were, in some cases, much better than me at creatively prompting their way to incite chaos in our group chats.

This got me thinking.

There will never be an easier time to give life to your stories through technology than today. And this will likely hold for the coming days, maybe even for the rest of our lives—assuming there isn’t mass censorship. 

As we age, many of us turn to digital entertainment to pass the time, whether it’s Netflix, Instagram, or YouTube. Today, attention is a commodity, and this shift in information economics heavily benefits the entertainment industry.

But what happens if the means to bring a story to life becomes truly decentralised when any kid with an overactive imagination and access to GenAI can create visuals that rival the CGI of blockbuster movies from just a few years ago? 

I think it will have amazing long-term benefits to how society perceives creativity.

Because realistically, there will probably come a time when most modern jobs can be replaced by AI-driven automation and robotics that handle manual labour. What then? Perhaps our value will no longer be defined by our ability to be productive but instead by our creativity, our ability to connect, and the stories we share. We may reach a point where we find meaning not in the grind of daily work, but in the act of creation itself—where everyone has the power to tell their own stories, inspire others, and shape the world in ways we haven’t yet imagined. A world where storytelling, in all its forms, becomes the new measure of human fulfilment.