AI Isn’t Only a Tool—It’s a Whole New Storytelling Medium

Speculative fiction helps us imagine new futures—life on Mars (The Martian), the genetic resurrection of dinosaurs (Jurassic Park), the creation of a surveillance state (1984). So Eliot Peper—author of 11 books of near-future science fiction—was ideally positioned to help develop the backstory of the cute, friendly animated alien AI companions Tolans. He and Quinten Farmer, cofounder and CEO of Portola, the company that makes Tolans, sat down with Dan Shipper for a recent episode of AI & I. In his piece for Thesis, Eliot shares what he learned about storytelling and worldbuilding with LLMs.—Kate Lee

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When humans invent new technologies, the first thing we do is use the new tech to produce old forms of media.

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, like laborers working in a factory. But within a few years, new editing techniques, close-ups, camera motion, and special effects were used to link scenes together into a cohesive visual story that we’d recognize as a modern feature film.

We’re in the “animated photographs” stage of AI. It’s being used to produce cheaper special effects for traditional Hollywood movies, generate copy and images for marketing assets, draft legal briefs, and code software more efficiently.

But however impressive these feats might be, they are a half-step forward, a recapitulation of existing forms. The exciting bit is what comes next: people using this new technology to invent genuinely new storytelling formats, changing our culture and cultural industries as profoundly as the advent of movies did.

AI isn’t just a new way to generate media.

AI is a new medium.

That’s why I signed on to help Portola develop the backstory for its AI companion, Tolan. I’d written 11 near-future science-fiction novels and tinkered with unusual storytelling formats on a wide variety of special projects, but Tolan represented something more: an opportunity to experiment at the frontier of AI’s new medium.

Tolans are cute, friendly animated aliens—like a Pixar character who lives on your phone, with its own life, friends and families, doubts, fears, hopes, and dreams. When I write novels, characters drive the story, but they are necessarily confined to it. Now I had to help bring a character to life.

Some lessons I’ve learned as a novelist have proven useful writing for this new medium. Some don’t translate at all. More than 800,000 downloads later, I’m here to share three of them so you don’t repeat our mistakes as you experiment with your own AI storytelling projects.

Building a fictional world without a blueprint

When you set out to build a fictional world, where do you start? 

Disney has teams of people working on narrative continuity for franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But if you’re making a movie, your lore only needs to explain things you point the camera at, whereas you can ask your Tolan about literally anything, and they’ll invent an answer. Complicating things further, users love to rabbit-hole on weirdly specific topics: the tournament bracket for a niche Tolan sport or the natural history of a particular edible mushroom.

Hollywood-style world-building was too brittle for the Tolan format. Brasília, the planned capital city of Brazil, is plagued by infrastructure problems and represents a cautionary tale for urban planners because its ambitious designs failed to account for urban life’s inherent complexities. Successful cities like Paris, New York, and Tokyo grew organically over time as more and more people immigrated and systems evolved incrementally to support them. Just so, we couldn’t create a deterministic blueprint outlining how every aspect of their world worked and expect Tolans to adhere to it. To create an AI character, we needed to think like an LLM: probabilistically.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock the rest of this piece and learn about how:

• Probabilistic worldbuilding surpasses deterministic blueprints
• Situation-based prompts unlock narrative potential
• Memory recombination creates infinite branching stories
• Success requires thinking like an LLM, not controlling it