The AI takeover is here and it’s not what you think
The real AI revolution isn’t about machines rising against us; it’s about something far more insidious: how AI is already reshaping human thought. Historian Yuval Noah Harari warns in Nexus that AI is seizing control of humanity’s greatest superpower: our ability to tell stories.
“AI is the first tool that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself.” - Yuval Noah Harari
For millennia, storytelling has been the mechanism through which we’ve made sense of the world. It’s how cultures pass down wisdom, how movements are born, and how we decide what matters. The stories we believe shape economies, political systems, and even personal identities. Now, AI is learning how to craft these narratives for us and it's doing it at scale, with precision, and in ways that bypass human reflection altogether.
Writing this blogpost, my process is to spend time noodling in my moleskin first on some ideas, then I'll write a first draft, edit it, pass it through chatGPT to edit and simplify my ramblings, and then I edit again. I find it tends to "flatten" everything, and so I correct by adding in paragraphs I like, changing the words it suggests, and I teach it to do better. This is a likely process for many people, and I know our workflows will evolve as we collaborate with it more over time.
Yuval tells us to be wary of how much control we cede.
The rise of automated narratives
AI’s ability to generate persuasive, engaging, and even emotionally moving content is no longer theoretical. Social media algorithms already decide what stories dominate our feeds. AI-powered language models write ad copy, scripts, even news articles. Soon, hyper-personalized AI-generated narratives will shape everything from our shopping habits to our political ideologies.
The danger isn’t only misinformation, it’s misperception. When AI-generated content floods our attention at a pace faster than we can consciously process, it alters our sense of reality before we even realize it. What happens when the stories that define our world no longer emerge from human lived experience, but from algorithmic optimization? I could already automate this entire publication, would you still read it? Maybe your agent does and combines whatever information is in here with other publication and serves you a summary.
Not everything is about efficiency though.
Human stories vs. AI stories
A 2023 study by researchers at MIT and Stanford compared human-written stories with AI-generated ones, analyzing engagement, emotional resonance, and cognitive impact. The findings were striking:
Emotional depth & authenticity
Human stories scored 32% higher in emotional depth, as rated by readers who felt a stronger sense of personal connection to human-authored narratives. AI-generated stories tended to be more predictable, and they often used cliché phrases and structures optimized for engagement but honestly lacking lived experience.
Narrative structure & complexity
Human-authored stories exhibited 24% more structural variation, using non-linear timelines, ambiguity, and unique perspectives. AI-generated stories followed highly optimized but formulaic structures, designed for maximum engagement but often missing nuance.
Memory retention & impact
Readers remembered details from human-written stories 40% more accurately a week after reading them compared to AI-generated narratives. AI-generated content was more forgettable because it lacked the unexpected—the unique phrasing, personal idiosyncrasies, and emotional contradictions that make human storytelling so powerful.
This data confirms what many of us feel intuitively: AI is excellent at imitating storytelling, but it struggles with being human in a way: this is likely what I mean by a "flattening" of the narrative. And yet, it’s these algorithmically optimized narratives that are increasingly shaping our digital worlds.
Slow Design as an antidote
Slow Design argues for an approach to technology that respects human cognition and attention. In an era of AI-generated narratives, Slow Design becomes more urgent than ever. It calls for:
1. Designed pauses for reflection: Instead of bombarding users with AI-generated content, we need interfaces that allow space for people to process, question, and challenge the narratives they encounter.
2. Transparency in storytelling: AI-generated stories should come with visible markers indicating their origin, intent, and the datasets they draw from. This the very fascinating world of XAI (Explainable AI).
3. A return to slow storytelling: We need to reclaim long-form, deep storytelling, formats that resist AI’s tendency to reduce everything into bite-sized, engagement-maximizing content.
I also think there's something beautiful in imperfection.
The future of thought
Harari’s warning is that AI is influencing not only what we believe but it’s shaping how we believe. Slow Design offers a way forward in designing technology that respects human cognition. The future of storytelling is one we can influence, and by extension I guess, the future of human thought.
