Alt title: You don’t need to blow up 500 cars to tell a good story.

For (hundreds of?) thousands of years, humans were able to find, create, and convey meaning through telling stories. For the vast majority of human history, these oral stories required the listener to use their imagination to fill in the details. And for generations, this worked well.

Only very recently did we attach money-making to the idea. Only recently did we decide that we needed to blow up 1,000 real cars to make a movie, or to napalm an actual jungle to show us what the Vietnam War was like. Only recently did we decide that packing as much spectacle, destruction, and even sometimes death into a story would lead to greater financial returns.

So now we find ourselves in a position where AI will let us show anything. We don’t even need CGI, or extras, or to destroy billions of dollars of property to make great art.

While this is tragic for the many talented and wonderful people working in the industry, it’s a return to what storytelling was always about.

Stories were never about the money, or the destruction, or the wanton wasting of finite resources. They were about illuminating the human experience. And the spoken word still does that just as well as ever.

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