The fundamental tools of storytelling like character and plot are timeless, but technology governs the shape stories take. Epic poems like the Odyssey survived because the poetry itself was a technology: Meter, repeated epithets, and formulaic phrases aided recomposition from living memory.
When humans invent new technologies, it takes time and experimentation for storytellers to explore the new affordances and figure out what new shapes stories can take. When motion picture cameras and projectors arrived in the late 19th century, people used static cameras to film stage plays and create "animated photographs" of everyday scenes. But within a few years, new editing techniques, close-ups, camera motion, and special effects were used to create a cohesive visual story that we'd recognize as a modern feature film.
Right now, we're in the "animated photographs" stage of AI. People are using it to bring characters to life, explore interactive fiction, and generate entire worlds, but these are awkward first steps. Future historians will look back on these early efforts with the same mild bemusement we feel when watching those first "animated photographs." What will the AI equivalent of a blockbuster movie—a novel format that makes the most of AI's narrative potential and couldn't exist without it—look like?
I can't wait to find out.
