HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND USE AI
By Eric Dunn
Co-founder & Executive Director
Not long ago I was snapped awake by a dream featuring Major “King” Kong riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Except in my dream, the Major was riding a server blinking orgasmically as they both plummeted to earth. In that moment of sweaty panic, a feeling that had been nagging me for a year broke through and metastasized into full-blown, ego-bending terror. Was a career spent developing marketing and storytelling skills on the verge of being flushed by the latest tool declared to make it obsolete? It was a moment of existential dread, in the dead of night, that could only be answered in the binary: accept extinction or evolve a new approach.
In the warmth of the next morning’s light, fresh cup of coffee in hand, I took a hard look in the mirror and turned that dread into inspiration. (Discomfort is the true mother of invention.) AI isn’t going away, whatever any of us individually declare, because it is useful. The truth is that its utility sits in the liminal space between what some proselytize as “life-altering technology” and others dismiss as “just another producer of slop.” There are bigger questions about AI worth losing sleep over, and plenty of people are losing it. But for this storyteller in the ad biz, the one that keeps me up is how to make this already-opened Pandora’s box a genuine extension of our craft.
Strip away all the hot takes about the AI-driven death of the storyteller and consider for a moment what makes storytelling itself great at the most fundamental level. It comes down to three core elements. Stories need structure to provide a tangible, comprehensible shape so narrative twists and turns are meaningful rather than confusing. Stories need audience empathy to develop a gravitational pull that draws people into the narrative. And great stories need the teller's lived experience so the meaning and emotion they deliver are genuine rather than manufactured.
STRUCTURE SERVES SURPRISE
Kurt Vonnegut spent a graduate thesis arguing that the stories we remember follow a handful of recognizable emotional shapes: man in a hole, boy meets girl and loses her and gets her back, and so on. He was doubted, but decades later, researchers ran the numbers on more than 1,300 stories and found he was more right than wrong. They identified six core arcs that show up again and again as the scaffolding under most stories. Once you’ve chosen the shape for a tale, AI can be genuinely useful in helping you hold to it. It can flag where the middle needs sharpening, where connections have been broken, or where the narrative has drifted off path without the storyteller noticing. That leaves a lot more space to find the moments of tension and surprise that make a story compelling.
In advertising, we have several structures we build stories around. The Sales Funnel. The Customer Journey. The Loyalty Ecosystem. They all share the same idea, though: an audience moves through the structure from awareness to consideration to purchase to advocacy. AI can be helpful in holding that form, mapping where a given customer sits inside it, and prompting message delivery cues so they can be creatively shaped. The goal is delivering a personally relevant story to the audience at a given moment along that journey. In that endeavor, AI can help uncover potential angles for connection with more breadth and informational richness than traditional research, highlighting points of interest that can then be crafted into moments of rewarding surprise.
EMPATHY EXERTS GRAVITY
When it comes to that audience relevance, AI can help start the job but isn’t quite capable of finishing it. Psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock built a research program around something they called narrative transportation. It’s the idea that people don’t just hear a good story; they get drawn inside its universe. While they’re in that realm, they feel more deeply and shift their beliefs to make sense of what they experienced. The vehicle for that transportation isn’t universal, though. What pulls one audience in can repel another, depending on what they already know, what they care about, and the context they bring with them.
Figuring out that vehicle used to mean sifting through an impressive list of segmentation profiles, focus groups, desk research, and audience behavior studies that delivered facts but not fidelity. Now, AI can cover more of that terrain in an afternoon, help surface what an audience already thinks, play out how references might land, and provide storyteller-driven interrogation loops that allow for a revealing dive down a rabbit hole. A storyteller can then spend their time with a map of those facts and truths, triangulating and synthesizing connections that define a story’s relationship with its audience and, in turn, the audience’s relationship to it. It boils down to this: AI can gather the inputs and tease out interest, but without a storyteller’s curiosity pushing exploration, the empathy that makes a story irresistible doesn’t quite materialize.
EXPERIENCE EARNS AUTHENTICITY
While AI can hand you more information and help inspire, none of that replaces the human experience itself. Human insight and the voice that delivers it sit at the center of any story with meaningful value. Any tale worth spinning, marketing or otherwise, needs a storyteller personally invested in the idea and its delivery. This is the part of storytelling that remains entirely human, no matter how good AI tools may get. A story’s meaningful value comes from life lived IRL, from having persevered and struggled, from having wept tears of joy and laughed at a ridiculous mistake. These moments are intimately human and personal, granting us unique perspectives and surprising observations. They get people’s heads nodding “a-ha,” bring a warm smile to their faces, or put that slight sting inside their noses as their eyes begin to water. Great advertising stories tap into that only by sharing real life, experienced in the round.
This is why the idea itself has to come from the storyteller, and there’s a growing body of research that gets at the distinction between originating an idea and simply executing it. A University of South Australia study, published in the Creativity Research Journal, tested whether AI possesses independent creativity and found that it does not. AI functions as an advanced tool following human instruction, and its output depends on the creativity of the prompts behind it. A separate, larger study pitted AI against more than 100,000 human participants on a standard divergent-thinking test. Some models beat the average person, but their creativity scores moved significantly depending on how the prompt was written, and the most creative humans still outperformed every AI model tested. What looks like AI originality is really a reflection of the human direction behind it. And that direction is only as genuine as the experience it draws from. A storyteller bringing a perspective earned the hard way gives AI something true to work with. AI can help generate and hold the shape of an idea once it’s been given one, but it cannot originate the idea itself, because it has no lived story of its own to tell. What comes out the other end isn’t an AI idea. It’s an executional representation of an experienced human storyteller giving it focused direction and crafting its response.
STORYTELLERS STEER THE MACHINE
AI can help deliver a story consistently across a hundred touchpoints and uncover audience insight deeply enough to shape how it gets told at any point along the way. However, it’s still a research assistant and information delivery mechanism, not a source of empathy and meaning. The integrity of the idea, that thing that makes a brand interesting instead of just “on message,” comes from human effort and connection. Expert storytelling then crafts and massages that idea at every touchpoint with the audience’s context in mind.
That brings the discussion back to advertising storytellers and how we help brands add value for their audiences with ideas. The two things AI genuinely expands, structure and audience relevance, used to be the two things that burned time and quietly killed good ideas before they ever reached the concept stage. An agency team with something meaningful and honest to say would lose weeks to structural trial and error, hemmed in by a limited, often myopic understanding of how an audience could be engaged. Now, with AI as a well-directed extension of the team, experienced storytellers can do more of that work, more often, and explore it more thoroughly.
This is the application I find fascinating, professionally and personally. As an advertising storyteller with decades of hard-earned instinct, I see a tool that tightens structure and helps sharpen audience insight as a talent multiplier, not a career ender. In fact, I think we’re better positioned as agencies than most to put AI to work as an extension of our craft, because we know what to keep, what to expand upon, and how to bring ourselves into the work so that a brand story comes from someplace meaningful and true. Making AI part of our storytelling practice helps us get a well-woven tale to market with the same structural discipline and audience precision that used to belong only to the biggest ad budgets. In the end, the story worth telling at the center of a brand is still all human, all the time. With experienced agency storytellers directing AI, the work of exploring an idea upstream and executing it downstream becomes far more capable of earning audience attention and building thoughtful brand connections.