Storytelling : From Campfires to Artificial Intelligence
I have always been curious about history and stories. And I have been a closet writer for a while. So when the idea of writing my first public blog came to my mind I thought this should be my first blog.
Storytelling and its Importance in Human civilization
Storytelling is a cornerstone of the human experience. The universe may be full of atoms, but it’s through stories that we truly construct our world. From Greek mythology to the Bible to television series like Cosmos, stories have been shaping our experience on Earth.
Telling stories builds a shared culture, reinforces values, and engenders community. Storytelling is a form of teaching. Personal experience or ancestral experience is relayed through narrative because humans find information more understandable in the guise of a story. Whether it is science, faith or history, narrative makes knowledge more plausible and easier to remember. Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, claims that stories help to grow neurological connections in humans. Stories allow people to imaginatively work through real-life problems and prepare for various situations. Gottschall insists that stories build societies because they encourage members to behave ethically. He believes that skillful storytelling was essential for the success of early societies. Telling stories around a campfire fire may have begun human cultural evolution and served as an ancient form of social media.
Stories have unparalleled power to inform, inspire and persuade us. For as long as human's have existed stories have been a large part of how humans have achieved the outstanding accomplishments up until the modern world. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state/city, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common stories that exist only in people’s collective imagination and passed on from generations. All the major world religions are rooted in common stories about the gods and their respective feats and the resurrection or reincarnation which ever the case maybe depending on which religion we are discussing and passed on from generations. States are also rooted in common national stories. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. The entire modern human world believes in the story of money and more importantly, in the concept and value of money. And has successfully built institutions around it...which is simply fascinating!
Humans are hardwired to crave stories. Story drive – the yearning to hear and make stories – is an inborn that precedents our language development. So effectively humans are storytelling and story consuming creatures.
How Storytelling evolved over time and how it continues to impact our daily lives
Storytelling methods evolved significantly over the millennia, though they began as just spoken words shared around a campfire. Sometime about 400,000 years ago, 81% of the firelight conversations was devoted to telling stories. Over 30,000 years ago, prehistoric hunters painted beautifully detailed depictions of various animals such as bison and deer on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. It represented a significant milestone in storytelling, as oral stories could be enhanced with visual images. Another milestone occurred when the ancient Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia (present day Iran/Iraq/Syria) introduced the first written language, Cuneiform, in 3500–3000 BCE. Oral stories such as The Epic of Gilgamesh—the earliest surviving work of literature—could be recorded and shared in a consistent manner and reach a far greater audience than was previously possible.
A fictional image depicting how early human storytelling would have started around campfires.
Though many elements of stories have remained the same throughout history, we have developed better tools and mediums for telling them, such as printed books, movies, and comics, podcasts, various social media platforms. This has changed storytelling styles—and perhaps most importantly, the impact of those stories—over the millennia.
Today in our digital age, stories continue to appeal to us just as much as they did to our ancient ancestors. Stories play a vibrant role in our daily lives—and yet we may not realize how much they do. A 2019 study estimated that US adults spend more than 12 hours per day consuming major media (which of course went up during the last one and half a year or so spent in Pandemic). Stories form the backbone of the news, books, television shows, and movies we consume. With the growth of social media, we have all become storytellers, sharing our struggles and victories with friends and family. One of the most popular features on Instagram and Snapchat is the stories feature that lets users post photos or videos for 24 hours. Instagram added 200 million daily users a year after launching Stories. We’ve also seen the rapid rise of the global TED Talks phenomenon. Much of TED Talks’ success can be attributed to new-age storytelling that is both free and easily accessible online. Analysis of the 500 most popular TED Talk presentations found that stories made up at least 65% of their content. Modern-day storytelling is also poised to be further transformed as virtual reality becomes mainstream, and people are able to fully immerse themselves in the narrative as full participants. Aside from our media consumption, our daily interactions with work colleagues, classmates, friends, and family members are also heavily centered around stories. Throughout your workday, you may recount different experiences you’ve had to coworkers in and between meetings. Interestingly, 65% of our daily conversations are comprised of social topics or gossip, which are essentially stories about people. When you get home from work, the storytelling continues as you interact with your spouse, children, and friends.
Storytelling also transcended into the modern business and workplace domain in the last 70 years or so and plays an important part in the modern knowledge economy. Storytelling is at the heart of everything that corporate marketers and communicators do. It continues to have huge impact in business, building brands, helping big corporations aligning the workforce to provide a common vision. When situations are complex or dense, a narrative discourse helps to resolve conflicts, influences corporate decisions and can help to drive big corporate changes.
Storytelling is also quite helpful today's data driven economy where the science of narrative is helping enormously in complex decision making based on data. I would focus and dive deeper into the topic of Data Storytelling in my future articles as I find it very interesting and impactful personally.
Future of Storytelling
I believe storytelling would continue to evolve and will remain a part of our daily lives be it personal or professional life and will help us achieve more wonders in the decades to come whether be it in business, marketing, social media etc. However, there is one area where I think it is making new strides already, sort of in an experimental way.
I have always been a big fan of great influential storytelling in movies. Especially those stories that struck a chord and have an impact to make a positive change. So speaking of movie stories, I found there was a new experiment done in the field of movie storytelling as well. In 2016, an experimental science fiction short film's screenplay was entirely written by an artificial intelligence bot using neural networks. It is the first film ever written by an Artificial Intelligence. The film is called Sunspring.
A BAFTA nominated filmmaker Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer. The story was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. Sharp and Goodwin both were obsessed with figuring out how to make machines generate original pieces of writing and hence they collaborated on this Project. Goodwin fed the AI with a dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online—mostly movies from the 1980s and 90s. The AI which is called Benjamin dissected them down to the letter, learning to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there which words and phrases tended to occur together. Over time, Benjamin learned to imitate the structure of a screenplay, producing stage directions and well-formatted character lines. Benjamin became the world's first automatic screenwriter.
I saw the short film recently as part of the research and I found it a bit weird though. But this is a good attempt and we can see where it can lead to. Given the progress we are making around AI and machine learning it does not seem far-fetched to say that storytelling could also have another aspect when AI becomes more mature. In the near future, the AI could not just be popping up stories or screenplays but could well identify, interpret a story’s emotional arc as well more efficiently. When that happens, it might just add a whole new chapter in the evolution of Storytelling for humankind.
