Is AI Rewriting the Rules of Storytelling?

“Technology changes, story doesn’t”. 

That mantra is one that Jake and Scott Friedman - brothers and founders of the digital production company Wildlife - have always held close to their hearts. And it’s an approach which has frequently taken them right up to the limit of what’s possible within the realms of modern technology. That includes using AI to make the iconic Queen Latifah the face of potentially every small business in the US, and making one of the world’s first interactive, embeddable videos for Old Spice over a decade ago. 

You might be forgiven for thinking that the industry’s current excitement around AI could prove a test to that philosophy. After all, we’re talking about a technology that is capable of generating ideas and then transforming them into reality in a matter of seconds. Surely that might have implications for the craft of storytelling? 

Speaking with Jake and Scott, however, helps you understand that the reality is a lot more nuanced than that. The pair make no attempt to downplay the potential of the technology - but their excitement is based on the idea that creative horizons are being broadened, not limited. 

“I was playing around with Midjourney at lunch today, because I wanted to try out some ideas for a pitch we’re working on”, says Scott. “Open-ended visualisation is really cool and fascinating, but it has a short life cycle. Yes, you can create a picture of a cat in a space outfit smoking a cigar, depicted in a Japanese manga style. It's incredible how quickly that can be generated. But what’s going to actually make an idea compelling will come back to the same fundamental building blocks on which quality work is always based.” 

Digging deeper, Jake expands on Scott’s point. “At the end of the day, great work has always been tied to this idea of ‘craft’ - and understanding the fundamentals of that is, I think, the key to getting the most value out of AI,” he says. “What makes a piece of work great and memorable is ultimately about taste - the taste of the director or creative who is tying all of these technical elements together. It’s a delicate skill but it’s utterly human - it’s the conductor who sets the tempo and brings everything together, making something cohesive out of a jumble of inputs.” 

But how does this apply to artificial intelligence? “I think there’s a slight nervousness within the industry that AI might lower the value of expertise, in that clients aren’t going to want to pay people to do things that a machine can do faster and more cheaply,” says Scott. “I can understand that anxiety, but the longer-term effect is that it’s going to change the definition of what ‘expertise’ really is. Maybe the most valuable expertise in a post-AI industry won’t be technical, but more human and emotional - to Jake’s point, it will be about finding meaning and narrative within a mess of ideas.”

To achieve that, the creative process might not look all too different to how Wildlife works today. “The important thing will be to ensure that your starting point is the story or idea, not the technology,” says Jake. “That’s always been key to our approach to any creative problem solving. We’ve had a number of folks come to us recently with traditional campaign ideas, asking us how we can build AI into them. But sometimes, that’s just an awkward fit. Not every project needs AI right now. Sometimes you just don’t need the most cutting-edge technology to tell your story. But it takes expertise and an understanding of that tech to know when and why that’s the case.” 

This comes back to Jake’s idea about the role of a conductor in the creative process. Perhaps that’s the true excitement of artificial intelligence from a creative perspective - that it’s pushing forward the limits of what’s possible for any of us to achieve with new tools, provided we can make sense of them, or that we can ‘conduct’ them. 

“I feel that the best of our work has always existed right on the borderline of what’s possible - they’re the projects we’ve only just managed to get over the line from a technical standpoint,” says Scott. “What motivates me to keep playing with AI is that I can feel that line shifting forwards. It’s not going to dominate my approach to every single thing we do, but having it in my creative toolkit is expanding the limit of what’s possible. That’s ultimately a good thing.” 

Tellingly, both Scott and Jake recognise the potentially revolutionary impact of the tech beyond our industry. “You look at things like deepfakes in the world of politics and the media and you can understand why people are worried”, acknowledges Jake. However, set purely within the confines of our industry, there is plenty to feel excited about. 

So much about AI connects to the future - how our industry will work, and how it might change the way we communicate, create, and even exist. But perhaps the keys to mastering its potential can be found in the past. Those same fundamental foundations of storytelling - emotion, humanity, narrative and clarity - aren’t about to be replaced. 

They’re so often the reasons great work has stood out from the rest of the crowd. In a post-AI industry, there’s every reason to believe that the best creatives will still be the best storytellers.