How to Stand Out From the Sea of AI Slop

AI can write, but it can never be a storyteller.

Nov 19, 2024

A few days ago, I was scrolling LinkedIn — the fluorescent-lit cubicle of social media networks — when I came across this banger of an AI take from Ben Affleck from a CNBC event last week:

Damn, Ben. I’ve worked with AI companies for three years, and I’ve yet to say “vectors” and “transformers” with that much confidence.

Affleck’s AI fluency is only surprising if you’ve never seen the 2003 clip where he predicts the future of the streaming industry. Apparently, his side hustle is as a tech oracle, and his argument here is compelling: AI will bring down costs but won’t take over Hollywood because it can never replicate the taste and ingenuity of human creators. It’s at best a craftsman — capable of deft imitation — but lacks the taste to “know when to stop” or the ingenuity to create something truly new.

I agree with all of this, but it’s a vulnerable take: What if AI’s imitation capabilities and remix-style-creativity get 10x better?

And that’s because Affleck’s argument is missing a core idea that — if we internalize and act on it — will allow human storytellers to stand out no matter how good AI gets:

AI can write, but it can never be a storyteller

Tech people often overhype AI because they conflate the act of writing with the art of storytelling. When we love a writer, we don’t just love them for their ability to string words together in a logical order or summarize information. We love them for their stories — and the voice, perspective, and insight that shines through.

As Ted Chiang wrote in his excellent New Yorker essay, what makes a story original and meaningful isn’t that the content is entirely novel. It’s that it comes from you:

Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.

As human beings, we are wired for story. When we hear a great story, our oxytocin spikes in the same way it does when we’re children in the warm embrace of our mother. Storytelling is our oldest and most powerful cognitive technology, designed to bring us together. We crave stories because they connect us to the storyteller and make us feel part of a shared human experience.

Just look at media and marketing today. Does it sometimes seem like a dystopian hellscape? Sure! But it also shows how drawn we are to personal narrative.

In media, power has shifted from legacy companies to “creators” — an umbrella term encompassing podcasters, streamers, TikTokers, and Substackers who have built robust, personality-driven media businesses. In marketing, every smart CMO I know has invested in long-term relationships with creators and is trying to turn their founders and execs into influencers on LinkedIn and Substack. The power of this trend was no more apparent than in the election two weeks ago when Trump’s influencer marketing strategy swung young male voters 28 points to the right.

A simple truth is driving this shift: People want to follow other people, not brands. When given the choice, we gravitate towards content from someone we feel we know.

Your story has never mattered more

We live in an age where AI is making informational content is cheap, and our Silicon Valley overlords are plotting to swarm our feeds with creepy, AI-generated slop. To stand out, you need to make people care that whatever they’re reading, watching, or listening to came from you and not a machine.

Luckily, people instinctively gravitate towards content from people they trust.

For a time — and I hope a long time — standing out will still be as simple as what Affleck proposes: telling stories with nuance, taste, visceral language, and humanity that AI can’t replicate. You see this in author Curtis Sittenfield’s short story contest with ChatGPT. Her story makes you feel connected to the protagonist, while ChatGPT’s empty prose sucks the life out of you like a death eater.

But Sittenfield was competing against an old ChatGPT model, and newer models like Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet are getting frighteningly better at imitation. To truly stand out and build an audience over the long run, we’ll need to do what Max Read describes as “being the main character in your own writing.”

It’s a relatively simple formula for non-fiction writers: Lead with stories from your life, hone your voice, and have strong opinions. The internet has been rewarding this formula for years, but it’s even more critical now. Your job isn’t to transmit information by stringing words together. It’s not to be technically good at writing. Your job is to build trust with your audience and make them care that what they’re reading, watching, or listening to comes from you.

It’s trickier for fiction writers, but the same principles apply — you need to build a direct connection with your audience. From Ernest Hemingway to Toni Morrison to Greta Gerwig, we’ve always cared deeply about the backstory and perspectives of our favorite writers. And successful fiction writers have been marketing their process for a long time. Stephen King wrote a memoir about his writing process. George R.R. Martin kept a detailed blog. Patrick Rothfuss regularly promotes his books on Twitch. Even Margaret Atwood has a Substack.

Whether we like it or not, AI will get better at the act of writing—it’ll stop sounding like an insufferable Harvard sophomore, “delving” into topics and insisting on “finding us well.” But even if these systems improve 50-fold, you’ll always have one thing that AI can never match: Your story.

The Storytelling Edge

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