AI and the Future of Storytelling (Part II)

On the Value of Empathy

Last week, in part I of this two-part series on AI and the future of storytelling, I wrote about AI in “The Great Hoovering; or, the Disappearance of Magical Human Language.” I continue this discussion below with part II. This week I focus on the future of storytelling.

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When our son was very young my wife and I would take turns putting him to bed. On my nights, I’d crawl under his covers and wedge my lean 5’11 frame uncomfortably into his short, narrow mattress. He’d snuggle close, exhaling delicate puffs of minty toothpaste on my neck. Then he’d place his small hand on my chest and unthinkingly knead my shirt, like a cozy cat settling in for a nap, and he would fall into a kind of trance as he listened to my soothing Dad voice.

Unless your brain has been dented by some dark and unfortunate depression, illness, or injury—or you’re a sociopath—you cannot experience this type of regular activity with a child without feeling an immense and deep sense of gratitude and love. It’s a bond that superglues you to your child forever.

The two of us read Dr. Seuss and Julia Donaldson, who were particular favorites of mine for their playfulness and their clever storytelling, but we also read—slowly over time—the entire collected fairy tales of the Brothers’ Grimm and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain fantasy series. After I’d read to him I would calmly, reverently, lay the book on the floor. Then I would lavishly, and with the showy fanfare of a circus ringmaster, invent outlandish fairy tales and regale him with wonder and derring-do until he fell asleep.

The hundreds of stories I imagined for him over the years are some of the most creative and bonkers narratives I’ve ever had the delight to concoct. They came to me in these moments with my son because I was free of the wimpy, good-for-nothing wanker in my brain whispering it’s all shit, moron! into my ear, which is what happens 90 percent of the time I write. My son’s unconditional adoration was the only incentive that mattered to me, and he was not judgy. He also shares my giddy interest in scatological humor (I’ll discuss my Unified Theory of Scatological Humor in a future post). Some of the stories were so bizarre that my son broke into delicious spurts of pure, angelic laughter. And there’s nothing as lovely in life as the sound of a child—even the distant sound of someone else’s child— overcome with the profound pleasure of a giggling fit.

I don’t believe in angels, but if I did, they would be children.

Some of my freshly dreamed stories were so good, I thought, that I vaulted out of bed once my son drifted off to sleep, grabbed my notebook, and jotted down all that I could remember. Eventually, a few of these jottings evolved into an entire 180-page middle-grade novel of earnest intent but dubious merit about three children who get trapped in a magical painting and must find their way out. Most of the stories I made up during this period of my life proved no more substantial than cigar smoke drifting into the air and slowly dissipating before vanishing forever.

If you’ve read my debut novel, The Book of Losman, you’ll know that my eponymous protagonist tells invented stories to his son too. In an early draft, I even included three of the tales I’d told my son. By the final version of the novel, I’d removed these tales because they were too baldly meta for the book, though I could not help but have Losman explain why, in the best meta fashion, he lamented these very same fairy tales I told my son as nothing more than fractured pieces of his pathetic self. You might think I’m nuts, but this kind of playfulness—the real and imagined cleaved in my head in both senses of that schizophrenic word—is every reason why I love writing fiction, and why I hope the inventors of AI end up one day having their own angry excrement chase them around the room like in that Jonathan Franzen novel The Corrections.

To some degree, these invented stories began as a low-stakes challenge to myself. Could I spontaneously spin funny and complete yarns to entertain him? Was I a good enough storyteller? As it turned out, I was!

Story-time is for Everyone

Kids are sponges with the ability to absorb and process great quantities of knowledge rapidly, much more than many adults give them credit for, so after a couple years, I decided to bring my son into the action. I asked him to tell me stories. Here’s the basic formula, I told him: All you have to do is make a character, give the character a motivation and a goal, put some obstacle in their way, then have them overcome the obstacle and reach their goal. Once you decide these things, I told him, we’ll build the story together.

Now, obviously, this basic formula can be modified to increase any number of elements, adding more characters, motivations, goals, obstacles, etc, and I certainly embellished quite a bit of my son’s raw material. Remember that middle-grade novel I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? Well, that’s what emerged from this father-son collaboration. The final draft of the novel was much different, to be sure, since in my son’s original the main character was a fork constantly getting shoved into people’s mouths. Today, this manuscript is an untouched file on my computer, a relic growing digitally dusty and in dire need of a revision that I’m loath to give it.

Nevertheless, my son really enjoyed hearing all these stories and then creating them too. The benefit of these nightly perambulations in story-time would prove obvious in short order. At eight he read the entire Harry Potter series on his own and had even begun to re-read the Brothers Grimm tales he enjoyed the most. Though he’s fourteen now and much more interested in sports than reading—for reasons far more complicated than being a teenage boy, as well-meaning teachers have told us, but I’ll save that discussion for another post—he’s still fundamentally interested in stories and storytelling. He’s got a keen eye for detail, plot holes, and ludicrous characters. I like to think his built-in shit detector, in Hemingway’s parlance, is motoring along as clean and smooth as an EV.

But stories themselves are like internal combustion engines, messy and complex. Whether you’re reading them or writing them, to make them work you have to know how to put them together and take them apart, repeatedly and precisely. It’s a skill developed only with the steady and ample training of constant reading. In this way, writers and readers are mechanics with rough, greasy hands. Kids whose parents read to them or who encourage their reading know this implicitly. They get it.

In April, however, The Guardian published a fairly alarming study from Nielsen and HarperCollins suggesting that only 41% of 0-4 year olds are read aloud to by their parents, down from 62% in 2012 (around the time my wife and I were reading daily and nightly to our son). Even though reading is a foundational cognitive skill for developing brains, even though data indicates that when kids are read to they have better vocabularies, greater capacity for language acquisition, and a deeper interest in reading for pleasure, many parents just don’t seem to care enough. Or—also possible—they can’t read to their kids because they’re working two or three jobs and not present, or they’re simply too exhausted once they’re finally home. I can’t and won’t blame parents for the extractive and stultifying greed of capitalism.

The upshot is that more than half of the kids surveyed in the above study are not getting the foundational development my son got when he was that age. So, when it comes to stories and storytelling, what’s going to happen to the next generation of children who’re growing up without books and stories? Especially in an age of rampant and malicious propaganda, AI, and increasingly poor critical thinking? When the truth is indiscernible from a lie? When words are generated, not articulated?

The last two paragraphs paint a pretty bleak picture; there’s no way to sugar coat it. If this trend continues, I honestly believe humanity is in grave peril. But I think there is a reason for hope, and it rests in one of the core tenets researchers have long asserted about reading, in particular reading fiction. If we are to fight off the three-headed monster facing humanity right now—the rise of fascism in the United States, the deployment of AI models that hoover up culture and drain the planet of massive resources, and the devastating prospect of total environmental collapse—we must develop a deeper, communal sense of empathy.

The Value of Empathy, the Future of Storytelling

How hard can it be to care for the wellbeing of a person you don’t know? It sounds easy, doesn’t it?

The problem, of course, is that the men and women who’ve claimed power in the United States in 2025 are some of the meanest and vilest people who’ve ever gained control of the levers of American government. They make Richard Nixon look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. This fact was flashing in bright neon on January 6, 2021, and yet here we go again—only this time, the pathology of hate is far worse.

And let’s face it, the hate is embedded like an ugly, blood-engorged tick in the entire Republican Party, which has aided and abetted a man convicted of 34 felonies, a narcissistic grifter who as El Presidente is blatantly enriching himself and his family by siphoning off our democracy to the highest bidder, whether it’s to boost cryptocurrency hacks, promote AI slop, or to sell the cheap and ridiculous trinkets he cons his MAGA base into buying at ramped-up cost. If Andrew Johnson and Huey Long mated and produced a love child, his name would be, well, you know what his name would be. I won’t give it authority by naming it.

We’re also watching in real time the most corrupt and breathtakingly unconstitutional Supreme Court we’ve seen in our nation’s history, willing to allow the executive branch to run roughshod over Congress and the Constitution. In just six months, the three branches of Republican-dominated government have deliberately and maliciously removed all guardrails designed to protect our system of governance from the very despotism we’re witnessing at disturbingly close range, and the American train is barreling headlong through extreme chaos toward brute fascism. God help us all now that ICE has 75 billion of our taxpayer dollars at its disposal, more than half of which is meant to build additional detention centers.

Hatred is encoded in this regime’s DNA, and those who seek power and influence are rewarded the more aggressively they espouse this hatred.

The Republicans in power do not care. That’s why masked thugs kidnap innocent people off the streets in broad daylight and forcibly send them to concentration camps in Florida. That’s why we’ve witnessed an actual government official preen, like Satan’s blackhearted queen, before cages filled with half-naked men stripped of their dignity in El Salvador—an image that frighteningly echoes photos from NAZI death camps. You think it’s a scene from some cheap and horribly produced B flick that floundered at the box office, but incredibly it’s not. I could go on and on, creating a litany of reasons why this government is so befouled by its own incorrigible hypocrisy and greed and corruption that it’s sinking our country into the ugly and swampy cesspool of the president’s own befuddled imagination. But I don’t need to. If you’re still reading this long essay, you already know—and you agree with me.

The future of storytelling lies in the promotion of empathy. This is hardly an earth-shattering notion. It may sound too simple, it may even sound naive, but without the concentrated efforts of millions of Americans building a wall of empathy to protect the vulnerable, I envision an ever-increasing disparity between those in power and those not in power. If corporate media refuses to serve as a counterweight to regime propaganda, then we the people must be that counterweight, reasserting the value of empathy in all forms of literature. Writers and books written by human beings who feel empathy for others, particularly fiction where we dive deeply into characters’ motivations and interests, are crucial to building a better society. As studies have demonstrated, “Reading novels enables us to become better at actually understanding other people and what they’re up to.”

Writers can form or structure their novels or stories however they choose; they can be traditionalists or experimentalists. All I ask is that they develop human characters real enough and vital enough for readers to understand the depth of their broken, angry, frightened, hurt, scared, beautiful, and loving humanity, and I want publishers to swing toward publishing stories of the marginalized, the hated, the underclass of people suffering the most today. The more we know about other people, the more we empathize with their plight. MAGA world wins when they succeed in suppressing knowledge, when they succeed in suppressing others’ stories, and we can’t let them win.

Every day, we are bombarded with news of additional indignities perpetrated against our fellow Americans (or, for that matter, Palestinians). In this dark moment of history, when politics have tilted rightward and hateward and inward, what I’m suggesting is that reading at all ages and levels is and will be fundamental to the recovery and/or maintenance of empathy and democracy. What I’m further suggesting is that books and reading provide an important antidote to the hatred being spewed. To be a reader is to seek knowledge, to seek knowledge is to be an educated critical thinker, to be an educated critical thinker is to know the truth, and to know the truth is to love your fellow human beings and to seek justice for them.

And the path to justice begins at story-time with your kids.