What do we lose when machines tell our stories?
Dear Medium,
Since you asked, here’s the part I’m grappling with in evaluating whether AI can help tell human stories…
Storytelling is the oldest art; if we stop sharing our stories and instead consume the artificial ones, where does that leave our souls?
On one hand, slop is slop. The ease of sharing content already decayed the value of expertise and experience in favor of who tells the snappiest story.
All platforms could benefit from a substance detector.
Because so much content is like a horoscope — generic statements meant to resonate with the most people, and they do. There’s nothing tangible to take away from the endless posts that say things like “speed beats strategy.”
At this point, I’m used to sifting through articles to weed out the content mills whose pieces skim the surface of reality. On Medium, amongst the muck, one can still find soulful pieces from people bleeding their life experiences onto the page. I’d hate to lose that.
While manufactured content is easy to tune out, I’m noticing something more insidious.
There is a lot of hollow content garnering thousands of followers and likes. Medium ladles up these pieces, which beautifully rewrite the same concept for dozens of paragraphs.
These “personal” essays are full of broad emotional declarations without grounding them in a narrative. They’re a flattening of humanity.
One recurring premise is — No one tells you how hard it is to find yourself.
It’s a vague, but universal truth. Within these essays, each line is pretty and could be its own inspirational poster, but there’s no defining example, chronology, or anecdote.
Each sentence loops around a single, unexplored idea. And the voice is always the same; it’s polished, sincere, and melancholic. The words pierce you, almost like a poem. But I fear that they are AI.
Because instead of expounding on their journey to find themself, they say:
No one tells you how hard it is to find yourself, only that the journey is endless and always just beginning. You walk through mirrors that bend your reflection into fragments, each one whispering a truth you can’t quite hold. The horizon folds into itself, and still you keep searching for a shape that feels like home.
That paragraph is 100% AI. I used this prompt: write 2–3 lyrical sentences on this topic: “no one tells you how hard it is to find yourself.”
There it is. Soft sentences strung together by nothing more than an artificial parody of finding oneself.
But that type of writing is resonating.
So, if people find value in these articles and essays, is that okay?
I don’t know. There’s something strange about a platform predicated on human stories elevating stories without a narrative behind them.
Will there be long-term implications of us (knowingly or unknowingly) consuming these tales woven by AI? Probably. Years of looking through filters have warped our sense of beauty, pushed us toward quick fixes, and pulled us into sameness. Why wouldn’t this as well?
Asking AI to write these poetic pieces feels like cheating. Not just cheating the process, but cheating the “writer” out of the reflection, earnest, and formative nature, which comes from examining and telling their stories.
But to be fair, I’m also a bit jealous.
That part ties into the question — why do I write? It’s an urge to make sense of things, to romanticize, to have permanence, and to be witnessed. Most of my work is unread, so envy racks me each time I read artificial fiction.
And hey, I’ll be honing my writing craft til the end of my days because I love it. Yet, it’s always nice when one of my pieces takes off or has resonance. There’s the rush of being seen and connecting across the ether.
So, yes, I’m jealous that AI pens pieces that provoke emotional echoes. But they haven’t spilled any blood to earn it. They just copied the pretty bits.
I read one of these pieces the other day — recommended by Medium. It’s full of comments, which are arguably more striking than anything in the post, because it’s all real people sharing their real experiences with finding themselves. I do believe there is a beauty in that.
So, maybe these AI pieces have a place. But what it is, I don’t know. Those posts are both AI-generated and Fiction.
They’ve replaced scraping of the soul with the scraping of AI.
The “writer” doesn’t lay bare their bones. There’s no embarrassment or shame, no ache of pity at a distance, or the utter loneliness of being profoundly behind in life and rent. There’s no survival or navigating the gulf of grief between who you are and who you thought you’d be. AI makes finding oneself the ugly duckling — It’s glamorized, poeticized, and fluffed.
This is materially different than using AI to reflect, research, or refine.
So, Medium, I’m interested in this conundrum you face. It‘s more than a policy; it's shaping the future.
Because…
If AI keeps telling our stories, does that mean we stop?
What would it mean for humanity if we stopped sharing our stories? What does it mean for the future if we abandon our ancestral art?
You’ve asked for feedback on AI for Medium, and I’m not sure that I know what’s right. But good luck in designing an ethical future.
XoXo,
Courtney
✍️Hi, I’m Courtney! I’m one of the founders of EverMore, a new community dedicated to helping others grow authentic lives in and out of work.
