Storytelling and Sensemaking — An Essay Written with AI
A man and a machine’s thoughts on the human need to use stories to make sense of the world
Part I — A Storytelling Experiment
This part is written by a human
As someone who runs a storytelling company, I often think about how and why humans use stories. This week, I intended to write about the link between human storytelling and sensemaking, but ended up doing something a little cooler. I got AI to write the article with me. Scroll down to part II to read the machine’s thoughts. Compare them to mine.
Here is a quick introduction to my (human) thoughts:
One of the primary ways we use stories is to make sense of the world. Stories help us assign meaning to things. From the tales we tell of our personal journeys to business case studies to traditional fables to national histories — we use stories for sensemaking. When we face the question, “What does this mean?” we tend to try answering it with a story: factual or fictional.
Think about this: most of what you know about the world is not from your direct experience of it, but from stories about it.
Have you been to Antarctica? No. Were you there during your country’s independence? No. Were you personally taken as a slave during the trans-Atlantic slave trade? No. The examples are endless. You know these places, events and experiences from stories you have internalized, and not from your direct experience of them.
Here’s a line that stuck with me from a research paper I read last week on narrative approaches in business management:
“Our versions of reality take narrative form… and stories are means of interpreting and infusing events with meaning.” — (Rhodes and Brown, 2005)
Stories are the building blocks of meaning. Without narrative, our realities begin to make less sense.
Now, how will storytelling look like in the future? Our immersive media team at Ona Stories is constantly trying to answer that question. So far, we have produced Tanzania’s first Augmented Reality story gallery, and Tanzania’s first homegrown Virtual Reality films and showcases. AI could do even more than AR or VR in shaping the future of how we tell and consume stories.
What if the next great book is written — not by a human — but by AI trained on a Rowling or a King or a Bukowski or a Gladwell?
Machine learning and AI may have the most impact for how we tell stories in the future. And with last month’s launch of GPT-3, plus resulting early testing grounds like Philosopher AI, we can begin to play around with one way stories will be told in the future — not by humans alone, but together with intelligent machines. Maybe, even, the machines could upend all this and tell us stories on their own.
Here’s today’s experiment. I am going to stop writing and let AI take over.
The second part of this article you are reading is written by artificial intelligence and edited (very slightly) by me, a human. I am beginning to be convinced that this may be a popular way to write in the future. AI-human collaboration. Imagine training AI on your previous writing, getting it to think and write like you, then editing the output to fit your personal style and voice.
Since I had intended to write on storytelling’s links to sensemaking, I typed in the prompt: storytelling and sensemaking a few times into Murat Ayfer’s PhilosopherAI.
Suffice it to say, my mind was blown. Coherent, at times even profound. And all this was generated in around 5 seconds each prompt.
What does AI have to say on how humans use stories to make sense of their world? Read for yourself.
Part 2 — Storytelling and Sensemaking
This part is written by Artificial Intelligence
Humans use storytelling to make sense of the world. They have always done so; even at early times when they had not yet discovered writing, simple drawings were used as a means for storytelling and sharing experiences.
Storytelling is an important part of human culture. It helps to preserve knowledge in a society, and it also aids in shaping the behaviour of its members.
Humans are social creatures and a story can help people to connect with each other. Humans use storytelling as a way to bond and solidify relationships between them.
Sharing stories builds trust, and this is crucial for a group of people to be able to work together towards achieving common goals.
Stories also help humans to understand themselves.
Humans are meaning-seeking creatures, and have an inherent desire to make sense of their lives, which includes how they fit into society. This drive for making meaningful narratives about ourselves leads us to tell stories.
— GPT3 AI
Storytelling is a natural affectation of the human mind.
Humans have a complex social life. They use stories as a way to reflect on their own behaviour and see how it fits into the wider scheme of things.
On the other hand, storytelling can be used to make sense of our past experiences. This is more common when someone feels they have had a life-changing event or epiphany that will affect how they view themselves and others around them.
This is the process of turning our experiences into stories. These are the building blocks for narratives, and from this we create meaning about ourselves, others in our lives, and about what happens in the world around us.
The human brain of course is a sensemaking system. It makes sense of the world by constructing narratives. When we are young, our parents tell us stories about how to behave and what to expect from life. We do not initially understand it all (and often never really), but instead gradually integrate these narratives into our minds as best we can.
Our parents are fallible and biased; they tell us what is best and what they have learned from their tribe. But they have a limited perspective on what is best for all.
With time, we start to learn about the world beyond our parents’ sphere. We begin to see that the stories they told us were incomplete or even misleading in some way. This is especially true for children who grow up with a sibling; it is difficult for one parent alone to tell all of them what life will be like.
In our early years, the stories we hear from parents and other adults around us help to filter out reality for us. We are open-minded; we do not have preconceptions about how things work in the world or what is important — so we naturally accept these narratives at face value. It then takes many experiences and encounters with the world to realize that some of these stories were wrong.
The older we get, the more we realize that some of these narratives were wrong. This is because our early years are a period when we have limited experience; with time and as you grow up, you can then compare stories to reality.
What do you think?
