If A.I. Can Tell Your Story, It Was Never Yours to Begin With
We’re entering a new era—fast. And for a lot of writers and artists, that shift feels existential.
Generative AI is now capable of writing novels, painting images, composing music, even mimicking voice and style. The technology isn’t perfect, but it's getting better—fast enough that many creatives are understandably uneasy.
But here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately:
If AI can do what you do—at scale, on demand, and with passable quality—then maybe what you were doing wasn’t as original as you thought.
That’s not a condemnation. It’s just a reckoning.
I’m not saying I’ve cracked the code myself. I’m not claiming to be the exception.
But I am trying to create work that doesn’t fit the mold. Work that can’t be easily slotted into a genre template or backtested formula. In one of my earliest blog posts, I said something that’s become a kind of personal touchstone:
“If you’re not bringing something uniquely you to the story—if it’s not a story that only you can tell—then it’s probably not a story worth telling.”
That’s the standard I’m holding myself to now more than ever. Because here's the reality: most commercially successful art today is formulaic, and that’s exactly what AI is designed to emulate and eventually replace. If you were making a living by hitting familiar beats with competent execution—romance tropes, thriller formulas, genre pastiche—then yes, AI will likely outproduce you.
And maybe that's the part we shouldn't mourn.
As Plato put it: “He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler, and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.”
I first came across that quote through Chuck Palahniuk and later echoed it in The Wake of Expectations. It stayed with me because it gets to the core of this moment: if your work is imitation without rupture, execution without originality, then what you called art was really just craft. And AI is coming for craft.
That doesn’t mean what you made had no value. But if the machine can do it just as well, that value probably lived in the process—not the product. It was about what you got out of creating it—not what anyone else will.
Eddie Van Halen and the Myth of Predictability
Imagine it’s 1970, and someone trains an AI on every piece of recorded music up to that point—classical, jazz, rock, blues. Feed it everything.
It still wouldn’t have come up with Eddie Van Halen.
Because what Eddie did wasn’t just a refinement of existing technique. It was a rupture. A leap.
A quantum moment of creativity—something no algorithm could have anticipated because it wasn’t in the data.
The paragon of unpredictability.
That’s the kind of spark that defines real originality.
And no matter how good generative AI gets, it can’t replicate the first of anything.
It can only replicate the next of something.
What We’re Really Dealing With
So here’s the paradox. We're watching two things happen at once:
The collapse of the derivative creative class—those who were good at doing what others already did, and making a decent living from it. AI will replace much of that. And maybe that’s overdue.
The ongoing exploitation of genius—because even when someone does break the mold, our systems still fail to adequately reward them.
Eddie’s innovation gets absorbed into the algorithm.
The artist becomes the raw material.
And the compensation? It rarely matches the contribution.
That’s the part that demands attention.
That’s what we have to fight to protect—not just creativity, but the value of the catalyst.
Not a Stand—A Surrender
Let’s make one thing clear: AI isn’t falling short of some idealized human standard.
And the real concern isn’t that it’s not good enough yet—as if it’s on an inevitable path to replacing us as artists or thinkers.
The truth is: that’s never what the model was designed to do.
It’s not a shortcoming—it’s a difference in kind.
AI is built to recognize and reproduce patterns, to synthesize from existing data, to generate variations of what already works. It’s an incredible tool for that purpose. But it’s not working its way toward originality—it’s working its way toward efficiency. And that’s a different game entirely.
So if you’re afraid the machine is just one version away from doing what you do, ask yourself: What exactly is it that you do?
Because if your work is built on predictability, yes, it might be replaceable.
But if your work exists to disrupt the pattern—to offer something the system never saw coming—then you’re not competing with the machine at all.
And if you're still debating whether to engage with AI—stop.
Refusing to engage with AI isn’t a stand. It’s a surrender.
You don’t protect your humanity by hiding from the machine.
You protect it by doing what the machine can’t.
Where the Soul Lives
Let’s be honest: the audience has always supplied the soul.
We bring our own memories, emotions, and meanings to whatever we consume—whether it’s a masterpiece or a mass-produced artifact. That part doesn’t change.
People fall in love with inanimate plastic.
They attach deep meaning to a catchy song because it played at the right moment in their lives.
They cry at movies built from clichés.
So it’s not that AI-generated content can’t serve as a peg for emotional resonance. It absolutely can. And it will.
But someone still has to break the pattern.
Someone still has to offer the unexpected, the impossible, the new.
AI can replicate the familiar.
But only a human can create the rupture the machine didn’t see coming.
The Reason to Keep Going
There’s still work to do.
The debate over how to protect that catalyst—the unpredictable spark of originality—is far from settled.
Because it’s not just about legislation.
Everyone can agree that human creativity needs to be protected, and still nothing will change.
It’s about the reality of enforcement.
It’s about whether human creativity will even get the chance to breathe before the machine swallows it whole.
And yes—that’s the hard question.
But that’s a topic for another post.
And I believe—
no, I know—
there’s still something the machine can’t do.
It can generate content, but it can’t create the first spark.
It can remix meaning, but it can’t make the leap.
That’s the reason to keep telling the story.
Not because it’s safe.
Not because it’s profitable.
But because it’s human.
And for now—and always—only we can do that.
Javier
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