Ai Is Coming for Culture
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/ai-is-coming-for-culture
Highlights
“I think that to build a story that makes you care is really difficult. Whereas I think suspense must be easy.”
Stories vary wildly, but one thing they have in common is their pursuit of contradictory goals. They must seem natural, but also contain provocative and illuminating ideas; their turns must be surprising, but combine to make a pleasing and comprehensible shape; they must have clear stakes, and yet be capacious enough to be interesting in different ways to different people. Their creation is rarely straightforward. “So many good things come from boredom, from making mistakes, from accidents,” Mensch said. “When you sit in a writers’ room, it’s really messy, and people are just pitching a lot of things. Sometimes the wrong pitch leads to the right pitch. You learn something when you can say, ‘That’s not the second chapter that I want.’ ” (Hearing this, I wondered if an A.I.’s bad story ideas might still be useful, as a form of automated spitballing.) At the highest level, a good story has to reflect its audience while modifying that reflection. One conception of storytelling is pastoral. “Every tribe has storytellers, and at night, around the campfire, we stand up and tell the stories of the tribe to the tribe,” Mensch said, paraphrasing a professor with whom she’d studied. The second is theatrical: “You walk into a dark room, and you’re surprised.”
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