You may be reading this headline and asking yourself why is the blend of these topics, Storytelling and Artificial Intelligence interesting? The simple reason is because Storytelling has immense historical importance while Artificial Intelligence has immense futuristic potential. It is like the perfect blend of the past and the future.

When I was writing my book, ‘How Business Storytelling Works’, an interesting piece of researchthat I came across was how in the history of human evolution, storytelling is one of the main reasons the human species has survived till now. Stories helped us create a shared wisdom, learnings and a set of values have helped us dominate this planet as a species. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence, although not a new term, is always forward looking into the future with immense potential. AI is the new buzzword these days with the Economist even carrying a cover story recently on how it can potentially transform the entire emerging world.

In this article, we look at how these two vastly differing areas may work together with the opportunities and the challenges they pose.

Variety of applications for end consumers

One major area how these two areas are coming together is the incredible rise of virtual influencers. Virtual influencers, which are AI led, consistently generate stories for their audience to keep them hooked 24 X 7 without the risk of turning rogue like their human influencers. According to the Economist, nearly $16 billion of commerce went through Chinese virtual influencers alone in the year 2021. This is only expected to rise in the years ahead as most retail and consumer centric companies explore virtual influencers.

There is major synergy of these two areas playing out in the world of entertainment and relationships. Movies with the help of AI are turning supremely interactive to drive audience interest and engagement. ‘The Angry River’, a short interactive film leverages AI and eye-tracking technology to gauge where the viewer is looking and then proceeds towards one of 5 possible storylines to suit the viewer interest. You should particularly give a try at the AI generated storytelling game - AI Dungeon. In this game, you can input a variety of prompts and the AI generates a text based adventure story in response. The stories are unpredictable and highly entertaining. For instance, I made Sherlock Holmes solve a murder mystery while eating Pani-puri and Rabri simultaneously. ‘Replika’, an AI led app that acts as your virtual romantic partner is seeing incredible traction in the western markets with at least 2 million users and more than 0.5 million paying subscribers. You shouldn’t try this app without speaking to your partner!

There are many such use cases in the world of education where the curriculum is crafted in terms of slick stories but customised to the learning styles of the students. Or storytelling is turning completely sensory with the integration of AI. In a cafe in Shanghai, you can listen to a particular music track that convinces you that your coffee doesn’t need a full spoon of sugar but is equally sweet with just a quarter of a spoon of sugar due to the sensory impact of the music track on your brain.

Gamut of applications even for corporate employees

Today, there are many areas where AI is helping improving our storytelling ability as corporate employees. For instance, many marketing professionals are exploring chatGPT to help write the first draft of ‘A day in the life of’ a consumer.While the AI engine cannot produce a human-like output today, it can produce a very decent first draft for me to build on.

Many companies are exploring designing their boring employee onboarding sessions as AI led interactive stories led expeditions. This is turning a very boring experience into something memorable as stories make it sticky and AI makes it immersive and interactive.

In our day-to-day world, you can use the AI engine which LinkedIn offers to make your posts more catchy and attractive with the right usage of tags and formatting. Try it if you haven’t.

There are AI led tools that are creating short videos on news about a company or important corporate announcements. Many of these videos are generated very quickly with the power of AI and their impact is very similar to the ones generated with traditional means.

However, everything is not hunky dory

There are many risks and concerns that emerge when these landscapes of AI and storytelling come together. Stories can create a huge positive impact but can be deadly on the other side with fake narratives and false information. AI can magnify this impact as it can help generate these fake stories with ease and sophistication.

This is especially important in the political space with deep fakes and fake stories travelling all over social media. Brands can be destroyed overnight if a competitor decides to deploy a fake narrative generated by AI on social media that goes viral. Digital waterproofing remains one way to address this challenge but it has a long way to go.

There are inherent biases in the AI engines as the data they have been trained on can have stereotypes about gender, race or age. Likewise, an AI engine that generates stories for your use can have these inherent stereotypes ingrained in them and these prejudices can be further aggravated if these are used as is.

Will AI ever replace the human storyteller? The short answer is no!

Whenever I am invited to speak in any conference, the elephant in the room is if AI will replace the human. In case of storytelling, I don’t think that day will ever come. A great story comes from building great tension. Tension often comes from human pain, emotional discomfort or tragedy. An AI engine can be trained on past stories but may be unable to create that tension that leads to great storytelling.

For instance, only MS Dhoni can feel the pain of not making it to the Indian team at the age of 20 years when he deserved to but was held back due to infrastructure issues he was faced with. No machine, not matter how well trained, can ever describe that tension or that human pain.

At least I am hoping the AI engine cannot replace the human storyteller so easily. The last thing I would want is to go out of business. However, I looked forward to working alongside the AI engine as it helps me write faster.