Storytelling, Storyselling,

I recently had an unpleasant experience. A video of a dog abandoned on the road. The person filming took it in and gave it a happy life. I went from rage to the verge of tears. I hit like, then read the comments and took it back. It was a warzone — people fighting over whether it was real or fake. The thought that it might not be real hit me with a deep sense of defeat. I think everyone's had this experience by now.

I couldn't sleep that night. That same day, I came across a post on a web developer forum calling for an outright ban on AI-related content — not just AI slop, but all of it. The moderator's comment underneath showed just how fierce the fight had become. Distinguishing real from fake was no longer just my problem — it had become a community-wide battle. I ordered two books by Byung-Chul Han: Saving Beauty and The Crisis of Narration.

Story

"Our team had an app with 30k users, search was getting slow, we tried adding a cache but it failed, and we ended up switching the database." — That kind of writing. Time, transformation, suffering — all three are there.¹ That's why I loved reading people's introspective blogs and posts. The smooth cannot wound. Without wounds, nothing changes.²

I was talking with friends who love films, and someone asked what I thought made a good movie. I said it's something that shakes me and makes me think. When that happens, it leads to major decisions, or life taking a sharp turn. (I don't really like superhero movies, but I love Batman.) And it's not just films — someone's narrative, a piece of writing with genuine conviction, can change me into a better person.

Eric Hoffer once noticed that when he got stuck on a problem, his hand reached for a book on its own. It was a trick to avoid hard thinking. He threw the book into the wind. "In such cases I could never be a real thinker."

I was absorbed in some thought unrelated to botany when I came up against a barrier that seemed beyond my ability to surmount. It would take enormously strenuous thinking to solve the problem. It was then that I saw my hand reach out for Muir's oracle in my knapsack. I realized in a flash that had someone who knew the answer been near me, they would have recognized my action for what it was — a dodge to avoid strenuous thinking. In such cases I could never be a real thinker. It was an unpleasant discovery. I threw the book into the wind.— Eric Hoffer · Truth Imagined

Storyselling

All you can really do is use the tour to fill up with experiences and thoughts, and then when you get back to the studio, that's when you release everything that you've encountered.— J. Cole

But even places that need stories have become places where stories can't survive. Reddit is flooded with posts disguised as questions, farming karma. Reddit varies by subreddit, but overall I think it's one of the last clean zones left. (Only communities with strong moderators will survive in the future.) That's exactly why a story that earns genuine empathy can lead to real rewards. I found global users thanks to Reddit. But I could never write a fake story. It's disgusting. If you benefit from a community someone else built, you should give back with your real story.

Threads is worse, from my experience. Only shallow exchanges survive by algorithm. And the exact logic is practically a black box. Since there's no concept of a "comeback" for old posts, there are plenty of people mass-posting like buying lottery tickets, often with barely changed content. Deep stories end up somewhere far away. What can people do in an environment where they can't tell 'stories'? Meta's Adam Mosseri acknowledged the engagement bait problem in October 2024 and said they were working on it — it's March 2026 now. "What do you guys do in situations like this?" — they don't look curious at all.³

In an era where companies dissolve and everyone becomes both unemployed and a creator, marketing has grown desperate. Isn't storytelling the foundation of it? But once unqualified hustlers showed up, storytelling lost its minimum dignity. No time, no transformation, no suffering — just borrowing the form of narrative. In Byung-Chul Han's words, "information dressed in narrative" — storyselling. (I'm the type who catches every plot hole in movies and dramas — my girlfriend calls it nitpicking — so lazy attempts that don't even bother with basic craft just piss me off.)

AI accelerated this. In just 1.5 years, AI generated as many images as 147.5 years of photography.⁴ On Spotify, AI music accounts for 28% of uploads but only 0.5% of streams.⁵ 75 million spam tracks were removed.⁶ Creating became free, but being read became more expensive.

Then are human-written pieces safe? I don't think so. I believe even those will come under suspicion. Someday, people who lived anonymously on Reddit will be forced to reveal themselves, and unless their identity can be cross-referenced, readers won't trust them either.

Soulselling

ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations.— Nick Cave

Nick Cave — the man behind 'Into My Arms', known from the film About Time. No experience, no story.

Beyond stories disappearing, we've reached the stage of stories being stolen. Soulselling. Passing off AI-written text as your own thought. Taking someone else's ideas without credit. Selling your soul.

Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) spent decades as a longshoreman. In the off-season, he sold oranges to get by. He lied to sell more:

One woman asked me whether I grew the oranges myself. I rattled off an imaginary farm and family. By afternoon the oranges were gone. Sitting down to eat lunch and count the money, I felt a deep unease. It was a shame I had never felt before. I was startled by how effortlessly I could lie, how I could do anything to sell. In my case, commerce was clearly a source of corruption. For the sake of business, I could have killed a man in the street.— Eric Hoffer · Truth Imagined

Hoffer was ashamed of it. Even after his books made him famous, he kept hauling cargo at the docks. What would he say if he saw things today? (I'm not dissing people who run businesses. What Hoffer was ashamed of wasn't commerce itself — it was fabricating a story he never lived, just to sell.)

What's scarier than the slop itself is that even non-slop gets suspected as slop. The default for authenticity has shifted from "trust first" to "suspect first."

The worst part of AI is not merely the slop itself, it's the destruction of all social and media trust. We are seeing the equivalent of unrestricted thermonuclear warfare for our cognitive sphere.— r/technology

60% of what that forum's moderators delete is AI slop. Moderators are the Dutch boys of our era. Their labor is mostly unpaid. (If anything, theirs is the real story.)

I'm tired of lazy posts that don't even bother removing AI formatting artifacts stealing even a second of my time. At the very least, even if people don't want stories, everyone agrees they don't want garbage. There are tools that extend human capability, and tools that disable it.⁷ Using AI to fix typos and using AI to write are two different kinds of tool use. (For the love of God, don't ask AI to write your humor either.)

I want to see more posts like "I decided to quit WhatsApp today," but this has become a world where even that is met with suspicion. At the very least, I'll try not to be a soul-seller. I'll try to remain human. Ironically, now I have to keep proving that I am human (= not AI). The day when I'll have to blink at a camera, open my mouth, and turn my head to the right every time I want to post something — that day isn't far off.