Show or Tell
Give an AI a story about a father teaching his daughter to ride a bicycle. It will extract themes: coming-of-age, trust, the transfer of knowledge through generations. Give it those themes, it will generate new stories: a master chef's first lesson with an apprentice, a grandmother teaching card games, a violin passing between generations. The translations work both ways, reliably enough to be useful.
These are fundamentally different kinds of knowing: the world as lived and the world as studied. A tool in use becomes invisible - Heidegger's ready-to-hand. Step back to examine it, and it transforms into present-at-hand: an object of study, no longer an extension of self. The critic kills what she studies. The novelist must forget structure to let the story breathe. Between these extremes lie other ways of knowing: the metaphor, the parable, the joke that explains by not explaining.
Consider what AI does here: it maps between incompatible cognitive representations. Story operates in the space of sensory experience, emotion, temporal sequence. Analysis works through abstraction, categorization, causation. These representations evolved for different purposes - one for living, one for understanding. Their incompatibility isn't a flaw but a feature of how minds work. Yet AI traverses between them, like a lossy compression algorithm that preserves essential patterns while discarding detail.
A reader encounters a story differently when she can instantly see its bones, instantly find ten similar tales, instantly generate variations. Every feeling becomes a pattern to analyze. Every pattern becomes a feeling to inhabit. We might take each way of knowing more seriously: finding structure in what was mere sentiment, finding life in what was mere structure. Or we might take both less seriously: seeing every story as just another instance of a pattern, every pattern as just another generator of stories. The boundary between reading and analysis dissolves, for better and worse.
Lead: Ari, Claude
Producer: Peter West